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TIME
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S
METAPHYSICS OF TIME
BY
Régis LAURENT
Translated by
Trista Selous
VILLEGAGNONS-PLAISANCE EDITIONS
16 bis rue d’Odessa
75014 PARIS
www.editions-villegagnons.com
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Forthcoming from Éditions villegagnons-plaisance:
METAPHYSICS:
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To Frédéric…
Acknowledgements:
Francine Letouzé
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CONTENTS
PROLOGUE....................................................................................... 15
11
12
To see k th e t ru t h wo u ld b e to p u r su e fly in g g a m e
P r o ver b o f u n k no wn o r i gi n ci ted i n:
Ar i sto tl e , Me ta p h y sic s, , 5 , 1 0 0 9 b 4 0
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
PROLOGUE
3 This methodology is set out in his doctoral thesis, published as Essai sur la
formation de la pensée grecque. Introduction historique à une étude de la
philosophie de Platon. PUF, 1934, pp. 7-12.
4 The first version of Werner Jaeger’s book, which is a continuation of his doctoral
thesis of 1912, was written in German in 1923 with the title Aristoteles.
Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung. The English version was
published in 1948. The French translation I used is by Olivier Sedeyn. It is based on
both these texts and was published by Éditions de L’Eclat in 1997.
15
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
16
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
6 Cf. Fernando Gil, La conviction, Flammarion, 2000 (p. 224, focusing on Aristotle’s
theory of knowledge).
7 It is hard to understand a commentary on a text without having first read the text
itself. This letter by Aristotle is available in an English translation by D.S.
Hutchinson & M.R. Johnson here: www.protrepticus.info.
17
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
18
TIME IN ARISTOTLE’S PROTREPTICUS.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
8 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert
Caponigri (Chicago: Regnery, 1956).
9 Bertrand Dumoulin, Recherches sur le premier Aristote (Eudème, De la
philosophie, Protreptique), Vrin, 2000 (1981).
10 D.S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson, Aristotle. Invitation to
Philosophy, Toronto, 2002, p. 2.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
11 This work is lost. For a historical reconstruction see Michel Ruch, L’Hortensius
de Cicéron. Histoire et reconstruction, Paris 1958, and for a discussion of the
initiatory dimension of this philosophy, “Cicéron et l’Orphisme”, Revue des Etudes
Augustiniennes, 1960, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1-10.
12 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy trans. Victor Watts, Penguin Classics,
1999.
13 Octave Hamelin, Le Système d’Aristote, 1985 (1920). Moreover, Hamelin
provides no discussion of time in the Aristotelian corpus, as though the issue were
absent from Aristotle’s thought.
14 Jaeger, Aristotle, Fundamentals of the History of his Development, trans. Richard
Robinson, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1934, pp. 374-5.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
23
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
Every Sect.19 It is only in this light that we can understand why the
philosophical schools were closed under a Roman Empire that had
adopted Christianity. The aim was not to ban pointless knowledge, but
to prevent the development of initiatiory practices that were not
contained within the rites of the chosen religion.20
The teaching of the Athens School went hand in hand with an
“initiation” in the form of a progression through a series of aporia
intended to lead to a vision of god. My intention in the present work is
quite different. In my view such a propaedeutic vision involves a
theoretical presupposition of the convergence of Plato’s theories with
those of Aristotle to a degree that is not supported by historical fact.
The desire to portray knowledge as tending towards a union blessed
by a theology that seeks to be a synthesis of all knowledge
(symphonia) has led to the merging of the theses of Plato and Aristotle
in which the latter’s thought has been reduced to that of the former. It
has recently been suggested (Rémi Brague, 2008) that this sacred
union of Plato and Aristotle lasted until the work of the Byzantine
Georgius Gemistus (known as Pletho, 15th century), who pronounced
their divorce at the Council of Florence in 1439. Pletho’s work, taking
the side of Plato, was translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1484 and gave
the Renaissance his historical vision, culminating in the Reformation.
It is hard to imagine the scale of subsequent efforts made by the
Thomist current of the Catholic Church in France,21 Italy and Poland22
to reintroduce Aristotle’s work as a standard for knowledge. Analysis
of Aristotle’s concept of time will give us an opportunity to show that
the theoretical kinship between Plato and Aristotle remains
problematic.
We shall start therefore with Aristotle’s early texts in order to find the
roots of his enquiry into time. Rather than going back up the path
19 The title of this work varies from one manuscript to the next. However, according
to its French translator Robert Genaille, this is the appropriate title. The initiatory
dimension of the term “sect” should therefore be preserved.
20 Cf. Pierre Hadot, Le problème du néoplatonisme alexandrin, Hiéroclès et
Simplicius, pp. 9-10, Paris, 1978.
21 Cf. Etienne Gilson, Le Thomisme, introduction au système de Saint Thomas,
1919, 6th edition.
22 For example the School of Llov, in Poland, was founded after Leo XIII’s
encyclical of 4 August 1879 Aeterni Patris, which advocated a return to the
philosophy of Aristotle.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
towards the Platonic mysteries, like the teaching of the Athens School,
this study will descend into human reality, where we shall meet the
Lyceum’s greatest pupil Theophrastus. And to descend to the
philosophical work of Theophrastus is surely to follow the course of
history rather than going back to Plato’s thought. Can can we continue
to think of Aristotle’s work through teaching in the Platonic style? To
do so would surely be to deny the realisation of his thought within the
Lyceum. Throughout the first part of this book, in following this thesis
we shall also seek to remove the initiatory dimension of knowledge,
which does not seeem to us to belong to his philosophy. To this end,
we propose to start at the beginning with a commentary on the
Protrepticus.
We shall begin by questioning the status of time in this official
letter written by Aristotle. We shall then seek to place the questions
we find in their historical context in order to flesh out the concepts we
have identified. Clearing away the layers of history, we shall see the
figure of Hesiod appearing. While Homer must be regarded as the
“prince of tragedy”, Hesiod will emerge as the master of the Greek
vision of time, until the arrival of the masterful thesis of that most
magisterial of philosophers, Aristotle.
23 According to Rémi Brague, Aristotle was 33 when he wrote this letter dated 350
BCE. In Aristote et la question du Monde, (PUF, 1988, p. 58), Brague suggests it
was a response to a text by Isocrates entitled Antidosis. Aristotle was indeed born in
384 BCE in Stagira (near what is now Stavros in northwestern Chalkidiki), hence his
modern epithet “the Stagirite”. It would be hard to see why Aristotle would have
replied to the Antidosis of Isocrates’ (436-330 BCE) unless we were aware that his
school was in competition with the Academy. Stagira was destroyed and Aristotle
died in his mother’s family home in Chalcis, now capital of the island of Euboea, in
322 BCE. Nothing would be known of this letter had another philosopher,
Iamblichus (250-330), not reproduced lengthy extracts from it in his own
Protrepticus five hundred years later, cf. Iamblichus, Protrepticus, French trans.
Edouard des Places, Les Belles Lettres, 1989.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
funding from external sources. Here we can cite a fragment from the
Protrepticus:24
Despite no payment coming from the people to those who do
philosophy […].
Aristotle was to find himself in the same situation on leaving the
Academy. When, to keep the School in the family,25 Plato appointed
his nephew Speusippus as his successor,26 Aristotle found a new
protector in Hermias before accepting the invitation of the king of
Macedonia and becoming tutor to Prince Alexander.27 We shall use
the fragments of the Protrepticus that have been preserved to show
that Aristotle develops many philosophical conceptions, some of
which set forth his early notion of time. We began by seeking to
identify a concept of time that had some degree of univocity, but were
obliged to note the presence of two very distinct concepts that
intersect and overlap, in a manner of which Aristotle seems somewhat
unaware. We should say again that this is a piece of juvenilia, which
the philologist Jaeger believes can be located chronologically before
the Eudemian Ethics, and which we are adopting as an introduction to
our philosophical work on time in order to develop our argument.
The first conception of time Aristotle uses places eternity before
human temporality, a conception whose roots we shall seek in Orphic
and Pythagorean beliefs. From this perspective, the series that is
24 Fragment 52, found in the Protrepticus of Iamblichus, VI, 40, 15; cf. also
Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, VI. In a later period the Stoics took up this theme,
describing as sophists those philosophers who asked to be paid for their thoughts.
25 Plato’s father Ariston was a friend of Pericles and said to be one of the last
descendants of Codros’s branch of the Athenian royal family. His mother Perictone
was said to be from Solon’s branch. Plato’s failure in poetry (his first three books)
and politics (the Socrates affair) naturally led him to protect the Academy as a
powerful institution. Appointing a foreigner such as Aristotle as head of the School
would clearly have been risky. For not only was Aristotle not Athenian, he was
Macedonian.
26 Aristotle paid the princely sum of three talents (18000 gold francs) for the books
of Speusippus as reported by Diogenes Laertius Lives… I, p. 200, who records the
account of Favorinus (Memoirs, Book III). This was the price of learning about the
theoretical development of the School that he had wished to lead and from which he
would be forever separated, Penser avec Aristote, Eres, 1991, p. 417. (Speech by
Jacques Brunschwig at the UNESCO conference in memory of Aristotle).
27 On this passage, see Chapter V of Jaeger’s Aristotle, Fundamentals of the History
of his Development, op. cit.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
28 The first term in a series was called henad by Neoplatonists such as Syrianus,
Iamblichus and Proclus. The same term appears in the philosophy of Plotinus as a
synonym of monad, as it is in the thought of Leibniz.
29 We have used the new French translation by Jacques Follon (Mille-et-une-nuits,
283, 2000), which was based on the texts established by Ingemar Düring (Göteborg,
1961), Anton-Hermann Chroust (Notre Dame, 1964) and David Ross (1955). In
1999 Yvan Pelletier also published a French translation of Chroust’s English
translations (after the fragments of Ross), which we have also used. Unless
otherwise stated, the English versions used in this book are from the aforementioned
new English translation by Hutchinson and Johnson. We should note that the
reference work in philology remains Düring’s German language edition, Aristoteles
Protreptikos, Frankfurt, 1969. Lastly, I have selected fragments from the
Protrepticus of Iamblichus, the authenticity of which is no longer in doubt.
Conversely, remembering that this work by Iamblichus was only the second part of
his book De secta Pythagorica, we should not forget the initiatory dimension that
may not have existed as such in Aristotle’s original version.
30 This fragment is from Iamblichus, Protrepticus XII 59. 26-60.1.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
from above (of Heaven). While arts such as medicine, architecture and
gymnastics are content to imitate nature,31 philosophy is a kind of
imitation of Heaven. Aristotle finds the authority for this position in
Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. Why did god create us? “To observe the
heavens”32 was Pythagoras’ reply:33
This is the thing for the sake of which nature and the god engendered
us. So what is this thing? When Pythagoras was asked, he said, “to
observe the heavens”, and he used to claim that he himself was an
observer of nature, and it was for the sake of this that he had passed
over into life.
So the philosopher looks to the heavens to validate his words, just as
the helmsman steers by the stars, and Anaxagoras observed that there
must be a noûs kubernêtês,34 in other words a guiding intellect:35
But it is clear that the philosopher is the only producer to have both
laws that are stable and actions that are correct and beautiful. For he is
the only one who lives looking toward nature and toward the divine
31 In this text Aristotle does not place poetry among the arts of imitation, as Plato
did. Aristotle’s thought differs from Plato’s ideology in its respect for the poet.
Proclus’ comparison of Plato to the great Greek poet Homer is historically
deceptive: “Plato is another Homer, not only when he is inspired to compose myths,
but also when he speaks as a philosopher and orator.” Commentaire sur la
République, French trans. A.-J. Festugière, Vrin, 1970, I, VI, p. 19.
32 Hutchinson and Johnson, p. 48.
33 Iamblichus, Protrepticus IX, 51. 11-15; see also the fragment from the same
source at IX, 5, 7-10.
34 The history of the character trait covered by the term philosopher is far from
clear. Herodotus records the words addressed by Croesus to the politician, poet and
sage Solon (I, 30): “Athenian stranger, many a tale has reached us about your
wisdom and your travels, about how in your search for knowledge you have covered
much ground in order to see the world.” So here there is a distinction between
sophia, which is mastery of knowledge, and philosophia, which is a desire and quest
for knowledge. The philosophos may be simply a curious man, whereas the sophos
has developed this character trait to the point of turning it into a distinct social status
within a School. Cicero makes this distinction in relation to Pythagoras, in V, iii, 9
of his Tusculan Disputations (English version, trans. Yonge et al): “And there are
some few who, taking no account of anything else, earnestly look into the nature of
things; and these men call themselves studious of wisdom, that is, philosophers: and
as there it is the most reputable occupation of all to be a looker-on without making
any acquisition, so in life, contemplating things, and acquainting oneself with them,
greatly exceeds every other pursuit of life.” However, we know from Iamblichus’
Life of Pythagoras that Pythagoras always presented himself as a philosopher
(philosophos) and never as a sage (sophos).
35 Hutchinson and Johnson. I have linked this fragment with Anaxagoras’ “guiding
intellect” because it seems appropriate to extend the metaphor of the ship in order to
understand that the helm can be guided only by reading the Heavens.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
and, just as if he were some good navigator who hitches the first
principles of his life onto things that are eternal and steadfast, he
moors his ship and lives life on his own terms.
So the philosopher36 turns to the heavens because it is only there that
eternal, fixed realities exist in the perfect totality sought by the sage.
Having contemplated eternity, the philosopher can then embark on life
armed with its stable laws, to make fine, straight progress. 37 There are
clear echoes of Plato here. The same conception is clearly expressed
in the myth of the cave in Book VII of The Republic. In Plato’s myth
an ascent into the intelligible world and contemplation of the sun,
representing God, is followed by a descent into the world of the
senses. The metaphor is the same in both cases: there is a correlation
between Good, the One and the heavens, since it is through the
mediation of the sun that Good is placed in human hands. Human
beings then pass from hell, night and Tartarus into the light.38 It is not
hard to see this myth as the source of a crucial argument concerning
time. Plato indicates that the seasons are first produced by the sun and
that human beings are chained and thus immobile from childhood
(516b). So it is the relationship to the heavens (and notably the sun)
that then brings them into a degree of regulated, harmonious
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39
Martin Heidegger proposes a reading of the myth of the cave that rules out the sun
as the tipping point between the sensory and the intelligible. The same rejection of
heliocentrism can be found among all Christian writers, since the notion of the
Incarnation implies that the Earth is at the centre of the world, Questions II, French
trans. A. Préau, Gallimard, p. 133. For this observation and other contemporary
commentaries on this myth, see Mattéi, Platon et le miroir du mythe, PUF, 2002
(1996), pp. 109-135, p. 126. We should also note Mattéi’s acknowledgement that the
ideological image of the cave does not conform to the structure of Plato’s other
myths, cf. pp. 118 and 139. At this analytical level, a reading of the “vision of the
chariot” in the Book of Ezekiel would not be out of place.
40
The Attic calendar featuring all the religious festivals was already in use in Athens
at the time of Plato. For example, on 16 Hekatombaïon Athenians celebrated the
synoikia. See Joëlle Bertrand and Michelle Brunet, Les Athéniens à la recherche de
leur destin, A. Colin, 1993, p. 46. In Aristotle’s period the astronomer Callipus, a
student of Eudoxus, produced a new calendar that later bore his name, cf. Jaeger, op.
cit., p. 354.
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41
Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, “Figure du temps: la métamorphose”, in Darbo-
Peschanski (ed.), Constructions du temps dans le monde grec ancien, CNRS, 2000,
pp. 49-63.
42
We note that the opening of the necropolis of the Macedonian royal family (Philip
and his wife Olympias) on 8 November 1977, long after the Celts had been and
gone, also provided confirmation that the emblem of Macedonia, to which Athens
was subject at the time, was a shining sun.
43
In non-Athenian places of worship in Ancient Greece, gods were venerated to
ensure the best possible results for agriculture. This was why Zeus was simply “the
maker of rain and fine weather”, François de Polignac, “Changer de lieu, changer de
temps, changer la cité: sites et déplacements de la construction du temps dans
l’Athènes archaïque”, in Constructions du temps dans le monde grec ancien, pp.
143-154, p. 151.
44
While it has been suggested that a philosopher had to be curious, the fact remains
that the term “curiosity” has no equivalent in Greek. It was left to Cicero to
introduce the Latin noun curiositas, which developed into the English “curious” and
French “curieux”. According to Alonso Tordesillas, Cicero is reported as saying, “In
curiositate oxypeinos” (“I am hungry with curiositas”). On the history of the term,
see Maria Tasinato, translated into French by Jean-Paul Manganaro with a preface
by Tordesillas, La Curiosité. Apulée et Augustin, Verdier, 1999. Plato was
undoubtedly struck by this character trait in his student Aristotle, whom he
31
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
It is here that I should like to concur with the harsh political critique of
Plato’s philosophy advanced by Michel-Pierre Edmond. In throwing
this mythological powder into the citizens’ eyes, Plato unabashedly
grants himself the central place in the functioning of culture. But can
any culture, be it Greek, Oriental, French or European, have a centre
and, if so, can that centre be embodied by a person? Doubts are surely
justified and are expressed by Edmond as follows:45
The philosopher replaces the poet to become the new figure in whom
society is invited to seek its own identity and question itself, because
he speaks to it of itself in a way that is public and verifiable against
these new benchmarks. Politico-philosophical fiction replaces poetic
fiction; it becomes a kind of optical medium through which the city
passes and in which it acquires an unusual degree of visibility. It sees
itself in this fiction as it is and as it should be. Plato was most
definitely the first to challenge the celebrated, future “Greek miracle”.
In Edmond’s view the excessive importance given to the philosopher
was a cause of Greek decadence. For a position of such omnipotence
necessarily places the philosopher at the centre of the city. The
philosopher is thus central to culture and must describe the present
time. Of course the same goes for the past, which the new figure is
required to reveal, replacing the old bards and rhapsodes, historians
such as Thucydides and so on. Meanwhile, the poets, those learned
figures who describe the future in the city, are muzzled in order to
leave the central role to the philosophers.46
nicknamed anagnoste (the reader). Plato’s irony is fully apparent in his choice of
term, since an anagnoste was usually a slave who read aloud to an Athenian
aristocrat. Athenians never read books themselves, even if they were philosophers or
poets, but listened to them being read. The fact that Aristotle was the first
philosopher in the history of thought to read the ancient texts directly clearly shows
that he had too great a “thirst for information”, as mentioned by Brunschwig (art.
cit.), to be satisfied with the oral sources to which convention would have confined
him. We therefore surmise that, though unrepresented in the Greek lexicon, the
character trait of curiosity was fully manifested by Aristotle. How deceptive
language can be!
45 Michel-Pierre Edmond, Le philosophe-roi. Platon et le politique, Payot, 1991, p.
149.
46 All knowledge preceding the emergence of philosophical thinking is then classed
as mythology, with the pejorative sense that this term acquires for Plato. Discourse
(mûthos) is henceforth split in two: on the one hand there is the true discourse of the
philosopher (épistemè) and, on the other, the rest, in other words the ancient
tradition, relegated to the category of mythology. On this tricky subject our
argument draws on the thesis advanced by Luc Brisson in Platon, Les mots et les
mythes, Maspero, 1982. For our own part, we see here the birth of a particular act of
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speech, the political source of ideological discourse, a field then unknown in cities
governed by monarchs, oligarchs and emerging democracy. So it is no surprise to
find such ideological remarks in Plato’s Republic. See for example Edmond’s
commentary on Plato’s republic 382d in op. cit. p. 150: “A people resort to
mythology when they do not know what really happened in the events of their
distant past, and the mythological falsehood must seem as true as possible.” Is there
a better definition of ideology? Is this not philosophy’s first nihilistic act? Such, at
least, is the argument advanced by Nietzsche, fulminating on discovering this
superimposition of politics in the domain of the arts of thought: “Everything
genuinely Hellenic is made responsible for the state of decay (and Plato is just as
ungrateful to Pericles, Homer, tragedy, rhetoric, as the prophets were to David and
Saul). The decline of Greece is understood as an objection to the foundations of
Hellenic culture: basic error of philosophers –. Conclusion: the Greek world
perishes.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann (ed.), trans. Kaufmann
and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage, 1968, I, pp. 231-2.
47 Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’Etre chez Aristote, PUF, 1994, p. 91.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
48 The Athenian political regime in which Aristotle was active applied the
autocthony principle and afforded no civil rights to aliens. For example, we know
that Aristotle did not own the Lyceum, since he had no right to own property. This is
confirmed by his will, found in Chalcis, and according to Jaeger (op. cit., p. 325) it
was Theophrastus who held the deeds.
49 Hutchinson and Johnson, p. 50.
50 This myth is recorded by Plato in the Timaeus (17a) and in the Critias (27c).
Pierre Vidal-Naquet reveals all the irony of this narrative, the sole aim of which is to
discredit the ancients. It would seem to be the most fake myth in Greek tradition – a
pastiche. See Brisson, Platon, Les mots et les mythes, Maspero, 1982, p. 22.
51 This conception of the Isles of the Blessed is linked to Plato’s model of time,
which we shall consider a little later on. For now we will note what Brague has to
say about it: “Greek legend also states that, under the reign of Zeus, the dethroned
Chronos was not relegated to an indeterminate place of idleness, but lived in exile in
the Isles of the Blessed, over which he ruled.” Brague, “L’isolation du sage” in Du
temps chez Platon et Aristote, PUF, 1982, p. 91. This conception is also present in
Hesiod, Works and Days (169) and in Pindar’s Olympian Odes (2, 70). For Plato the
Isles of the Blessed represented the philosophical life. The Academy represented the
Isles in the City, as the place of the blessed. After many vicissitudes, the Platonic
school selected the neighbourhood of the gymnasium of Akadémos as the site of this
philosophical place (the Academy). Meanwhile Aristotle moved to Assos, the Troad
coast and Mytilene and spent time in Macedonia before returning to Athens, at the
age of 45, to found the peripatetic school, the Lyceum – a study garden, as Jaeger
called it.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
We should add that, to our knowledge, this is also the only place
in the entire Aristotelian corpus in which Aristotle mentions a fault, an
element of shame linked to the past, in a rhetorical register generally
seen as reflecting a sense of guilt.52 There is no trace of such an idea
of culpability in Aristotle’s Ethics, which we propose to discuss. So
where does it come from? In this text Aristotle refers to these two
Platonic myths, but he could equally well have chosen others from the
same catalogue, most of which convey the same vision. We could
mention, for example, the allegory of the fish in the Phaedo,53 the
myth of Glaucos or the allegory of the beasts in The Republic.54 After
a long time spent reading all these myths and allegories, Schuhl
attributes them all to a single source in the Orphic and Pythagorean
tradition which, while perhaps periodically nourished by truly
scientific discoveries, remains profoundly religious:55
Similarly in the great myths of the soul, the abstract construct of
individual destiny, domined by the idea of a judgement involving a
fall and expiation, is illustrated by a growing wealth of images in the
Gorgias, Phaedo, Republic and Phaedrus, and reappears more quickly
in the Timaeus and the Laws. These images are borrowed from either
the Orphic and Pythagorean traditions, whose source can be dated
back to the Minoan civilisation, or the most recent scientific notions,
as in the Phaedo […], while that of the world of the blessed makes use
of new geographical research.
The poetic work in these different versions is clear to see, and similar
in every way to the work of dreams, which seeks to integrate recent
scientific discoveries – the diurnal elements – with the nocturnal
elements of the past, in other words the cultural tradition.56 However,
it does seem that this heritage is Pythagorean, as Jaeger also
52 Aristotle does of course include shame (aiskuné) in his work, but he does not
integrate it into his personal ethics, cf. notably Rhetoric, 78b 24, 83b 12-13, 85a 13
and 90a 2.
53 Plato, Phaedo, 109-110, French trans. Brisson.
54 Plato, Republic, X, 611 for the first myth and IX, 586 for the second.
55 Schuhl, La fabulation platonicienne, Vrin, 1968, p. 44.
56 Long before psychoanalysis and its founder Sigmund Freud, the work of
mythology was compared to that of dreams by Plotinus, cf. Enneads, V, 5, §12.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
suggests,57 and here again we see why the Neoplatonists were later so
drawn to this text by Aristotle.58
Confirmation is provided by the internal consistency of the text.
At the end of the letter Aristotle describes a particular initiatory rite,
the origins of which can easily be found in Pythagoreanism. As we
have just seen, Aristotle found an underlying authority for his art in
Pythagoreanism, and this was the most widely held view in the Athens
School:59
So who would consider himself successful and happy, looking at these
things for which we have been composed right from the beginning by
nature, as if for punishment – all of us – as they say the mysteries
relate? For the ancients express this in an inspired way by saying the
soul “pays a punishment” and we live for the atonement of certain
great failings.
Failings and guilt are key components of a certain Orphic belief.60 But
crucially it is the relationship between this belief and initiation that
explains the conception of time that persists in Aristotle’s words, still
uttered under the influence of his master Plato. Initiatory cults all
involve a belief in eternal knowledge that can be acquired through an
initiation that brings about revelation.61 And it is this belief in
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allowed to enjoy the freedom of their soul: thus, in a sense diametrically opposed to
that in which Christianity has made use of its God. […] ‘It is a wonder!’ he says on
one occasion – at issue is the case of Aegisthos, a very serious case – ‘It is a wonder
how much mortals complain about the gods! They allege that evil comes only from
us; but they are the authors of their own misery, even contrary to fate, through lack
of reason.” (Trans. Douglas Smith, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008, p. 74). Here
Nietzsche is referring to a passage from Homer’s Odyssey, I, 32-34, which we shall
analyse below.
62 Hutchinson and Johnson, p. 42 (Iamblichus, VIII, 48.2-48.9).
63 Cf. Plato, Phaedo, 82e 2 sq.
64 For a critique of this approach, see Nietzsche, “What is the meaning of ascetic
ideals?” The Genealogy of Morals III, p. 77 ff. Incidentally, “The ascetic treats life
as a wrong track along which one must retrace one's steps to the point at which it
begins; or as a mistake which one rectifies”, p. 96.
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65 Hutchinson and Johnson, p. 37, Iamblichus, VII, 44. 9-13. Another fragment
confirms this position (p. 37, Iamblichus, VII, 44, 17-20): “If living is valuable
because of sensation, and sensation is a kind of cognition, and we choose it because
the soul is capable of recognizing by means of it…”
66 David Ross trans. fragment 12; this passage was found in Cicero’s De natura
deorum (37).
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67 We shall see that this relates to a different religious tradition, the Iranian
conception that Plato would adopt at the end of his life. The same tradition was
followed by Nietzsche, through a return to an old esoteric doctrine arising out of
Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian texts from the Sassanian period in Iran (and
perhaps also older texts, though this would require verification) explain that the
world will continue for 9,000 or 12,000 years, depending on whether time unfolds
over two or three trimillennia. The second or third trimillennium launches the entire
cycle and human beings; the third or fourth sees the end of the overall cycle, with
the coming of Zarathustra. On this question Jaeger provides the following
information (op. cit., p. 132): “From that time onwards the Academy was keenly
interested in Zarathustra and the teaching of the Magi. Plato’s pupil Hermodorus
discussed astralism in his Mathematics, he derived the name Zarathustra from it,
declaring that it means ‘star-worshipper’.” This phase is known to mark the end of
the struggle between good and evil, between Ormuzd (the good, who would become
Zeus) and Ahriman (the bad, who would become Hades).
68 Hutchinson and Johnson, p. 42; Iamblichus, VIII, 48. 9-13.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
75 Jaeger, op. cit., p. 57 (note 6, p. 435). We have cited the extract cited by Jaeger,
(fragment 57 of Pap. Oxyrh. Vol. IV, pp. 83 sq.) of which Aristotle provides only a
part.
76 Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, XII, 2, ed. Barnes.
77 Hutchinson and Johnson, p. 48, Iamblichus, IX 51. 16-52. 5.
78 This precedence is nothing more or less than respect for human life and, more
generally in Aristotle’s work, for biological life including all non-human species
(animals and plants). Life precedes all thought, which is why the study of animals
and plants is one of the finest manifestations of this respectful approach to life. See
for example Aristotle’s On Length and Shortness of Life in Barnes vol. 1.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
temporality is then split into the two correlative times of the body and
soul. It is beause these times are so to speak “homogenous” that the
evolution of the one leads to the evolution of the other, in other words
it is not possible for wisdom, the end of the time of the soul, to exist at
the beginning of the time of the flesh, in childhood. Similarly and
reciprocally, it is impossible for the end of the human body not to be
accompanied by a degree of wisdom. It is impossible for an old man
to have a child’s unregulated soul. While the genetic evolution of
human beings may be natural, how does cultural wisdom have time to
develop? Time may be a necessary criterion, but it is certainly not
enough.79 The soul develops through education, which is, Aristotle
tells us here, the minimum condition for the acquisition of happiness.
And while animals quickly acquire a degree of independent life,
human beings must constantly employ a great many arts to ensure
their survival until their biological end:80
For example, to begin with, even with reproduction, some seeds
presumably germinate unguarded, whatever kind of land they may fall
onto, but others also need the skill of farming; and, in a similar way,
some animals also attain their full nature by themselves, but a human
needs many skills for his security, both at first in respect of their birth,
and again later, in respect of their nurturing.
The young Aristotle divides engendered things into those engendered
by nature and those engendered by art, but both move towards a goal
(those engendered by chance have no goal). Nature tends towards a
goal higher than that of human art, since the arts are content merely to
imitate Nature.81 For this reason, in order to attain wisdom, the
ultimate goal of education, human beings must employ many arts to
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reach the same autonomy as natural things that ensure their own
survival.82 Here we have the reason why philosophy must necessarily
be a synthesis of all the other arts. In order to be sure of acquiring the
full autarchy of his soul, a man must master philosophy, the art of the
individual arts. A second reason for this can be seen in the history of
philsophy, which was chronologically the last art to emerge in Athens.
As the end is also the completion of something, the fact that
philosophy emerged after the other arts clearly shows that it is the
quintessential art, fully completing all the individual arts.
So we can witness Aristotle’s conception of time becoming
consolidated and, in so doing, moving further away from Plato. The
time of the soul correlates to that of the body. This necessarily leads to
the idea that cyclical time is no longer present. This becomes the
fundamental idea of Aristotle’s ethical edifice. We must understand
that this is all made possible solely by the presence of the body, which
supports the cultural timespan in which, as we shall see, the habitual
(éthos: ethical) aspect of human beings can emerge. The whole
conception is wrapped in a primary, fundamental respect for human
life, which is part of overall biological life including animals and
plants.83 From this, it becomes clear that Aristotle locates the human
condition in the interval between birth and death, which is the span of
a possible ethics. But more importantly, it is the end that governs the
unfolding of the temporal series. This is true of both human time,
which relates to the body, and history, as shown by the status of
philsophy itself. The greatest degree of perfection necessarily comes
at the end, which is why philosophy is indisputably the quintessential
art. In sum, the “end” is the completion of all things. From this
starting point it is apparent that, while this philosophy is an argument
for temporal continuity culminating in Aristotle’s concept of habit in
his Ethics, analysis of the “end” that governs all this temporality will
82 This ideal of autarchy, which was conveyed by the primarily Athenian culture,
finds perfect expression in a passage from the Politics: “Besides, the final cause and
end of a thing is the best, and to be self-sufficing is the end and the best”, I, 2, 1252b
8, trans. Barnes.
83 In this regard it is noteworthy that when Aristotle analyses the political domain
he uses the term zôon politikon, the animal of his Politics, the man in the city, and so
remains anchored in the biological dimension, which human beings share with the
other species of Nature, Nichomachean Ethics, I, 5, 1097b 11, IX, 9, 1169b 18, VIII,
14, 1162a 17-18, Eudemian Ethics, VII, 10, 1242a 22-23; Politics, I, 2, 1253a 7-8.
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But let us now return to the questions we have sought to discuss on the
basis of the Protrepticus. We have identified a conception of time that
differs radically from the one we presented in the previous section.
The time of the philosopher’s soul is no longer set in train by an
earlier knowledge; eternity appears at the end of the course of human
life. The whole is consubstantial with temporal completion. This is
why the vision of a certain totality, the Good that is correlative with
happiness and supreme wisdom, can be acquired only after a long
journey through human time. True wisdom is thus necessarily
consubstantial with old age. However, the following questions remain:
84 The establishment in the Protrepticus of the twin terms “capacity” and “activity”,
which together form the concept of “entelechy”, is not a thesis we have projected
onto the text for the purposes of argument. It becomes even clearer if we accord the
following fragment its proper value: “Thus this is what it is to use anything: if the
capacity is for a single thing, when someone is doing this very thing, and if the
capacity is for a number of things, when he is doing the best of them; for example,
with flutes, one uses them either only when playing the flute, or most of all then, as
its other uses are presumably also for the sake of this. Thus one should say that
someone who uses a thing correctly is using it more, for the natural objective and
mode of use belong to someone who uses a thing in a beautiful and precise way.”
Hutchinson and Johnson, p 56, Iamblichus XI, 57.23-58.3. See also # 75. “The word
‘living’ seems to mean two things, one with reference to a capacity and the other
with reference to an activity.” p. 55.
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In the next part we propose to clarify the division we have used in this
commentary. On the one hand is an initiatory time for which Plato
argues. This time is circular, like the movement of the stars in their
sphere. It is the circularity of this time that guarantees its permanence,
in other words its continuity. On the other hand Aristotle can be seen
as the first philosopher to formulate a strictly philsophical conception
of time. This being so, can we identify the sources of his analysis?
What notions did Aristotle borrow in order to form this concept of
time? Is his intuition philosophical, theological, or poetic? In the first
instance we shall seek to flesh out the Greek notion of time through a
historico-sociological approach, in order to identify Aristotle’s
sources. In so doing we shall adopt the methodology proposed by
Schuhl, in whose view:85
To give the thought of the philosophers of a particular country and
time its full value, we must first be able to relate it to its preceding
periods and relocate it in the social milieus within which it developed.
We should note that the historico-sociological method as developed
by Schuhl should not be confused with the historico-comparative
method used in philology, the ashes of which provided Saussure with
the terrain on which to build modern linguistics. Far from constituting
any kind of conceptual determinism, this method simply reveals the
conditioning affecting conceptual functioning while also providing the
a priori conditions if its existence.86
We shall start by considering conceptions of time in the work of the
epic and tragic poets. We shall then analyse circular time in Hesiod’s
85 See the Preface to Schuhl’s doctoral thesis, published as Essai sur la formation
de la pensée grecque…, op. cit., p. XI.
86 However, what these two conceptions have in common is a refusal to use
language as the starting point to conceive the concept. Saussure would say: “starting
from words in defining things is a bad procedure”, Course in General Linguistics,
Wade Buskin trans., Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (eds.), Columbia University
Press, 1959, p. 14.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
48
II. TIME IN GREEK TRAGIC POETR Y AND IN
HOMER’S EPIC POETRY.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
there has been an underlying thesis suggesting that Greek time was
circular. And it is through this return to the Greek ideal that the proof
of circularity is provided. Under cover of conceptual innovation, these
philosophies in fact envelop time in a mythology of the Platonic type.
As the present work is not a study of German philosophy, we shall
simply note that this circular conception of time, said to have its
origins in the Greek tradition, or projected onto this tradition for
religious or ideological reasons, is really the starting point for a
conception that cannot be reconciled with reason, since reason always
makes room for succession, as Kant so clearly shows in his Critique of
Pure Reason.92
Kant’s rationality runs counter to the Germanic ideology. We need
to return to the Greek sources in order to permanently distance
ourselves from the Germanic ideology inherent in Hegel, Nietzsche
and, above all, Heidegger.
So we shall ask the following question: was Greek time circular?
We shall not claim to give a definitive answer. However, if the
discussions that follow can shed a little light and provide a few
rational outlines of the notion itself, we shall feel the right
groundwork has been done for something we shall not touch on at all
terms fiera (justification) /esse (justice) /agere (good works) properly constitute
progression, a circular movement, a sempiternal circuit (currunt semper). The
Christian moves from sin to justice, from spiritual non-being (non esse in spiritu) to
spiritual being (esse in spiritu), through justification, and this justification is his
spiritual destiny (fiera spiritu)” p. 58. The end of this work even suggests an exit
worthy of this philosophy. How are “sin”, “anxiety” and “worry” to be escaped?
Simply by reading St Augustine: “Let us look more closely with St Augustine 1 at
John IV, 18, ‘There is no fear in love’, and the continuation of this verse, which
Heidegger did not cite, ‘But perfect love casteth out fear.’ Fear is an introduction to
love: ‘Fear prepares a place for charity. But when once charity has begun to inhabit,
the fear which prepared the place for it is cast out’, p. 270. It is by charity that we
free ourselves from fear and this also means that time seems to open up before us, in
what we call the future. Cf. also André Comte-Sponville, L’être-temps, PUF, 1999,
p. 98: “Here we must lift Heidegger’s prohibition, free ourselves of fear and anxiety
and return to the Greeks, to ousia as presence and to the parousia of the world: being
is being present and there is nothing else.”
92 It is precisely this succession that entails the notion of numerical series in Kant’s
reasoning: “Time is in itself a series (and the formal condition of all series), and
hence, in relation to a given present, we must distinguish a priori in it the
antecedentia as conditions (time past) from the consequentia (time future)”, The
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
The first suspicion in this regard appears in the work of the Hellenist
Jacqueline de Romilly, who, in her important Le temps dans la
tragédie grecque, suggests the need for circumspection in relation to
this old chestnut of academic philosophy:94
It is generally agreed that the Ancient Greeks favoured that which
remains over that which changes, permanence over evolution. They
have readily been attributed with doctrines such as those of cyclical
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time and the eternal return. This aspect has been greatly exaggerated.
However, it is true that they liked the idea of an orderly cosmos or
universe, in which time presided over regular alternation, rather than
open-ended progress or perpetual transformation. For them time was
something of a threat. It was not an evolution they wanted to be part
of.
In support of her thesis Romilly revisits the works of the tragic poets
(Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles), leading rapidly to a strange
observation: time seems to be completely absent from the work of the
poets. Neither divine nor objective, and still les sacred, time seems to
be a floating notion, to which each poet strives to give form.
Observing this, Romilly suggests:95
Time did not exist in the Greek tradition. The Orphic poets may have
been the first to give it a place. But in the literary works that have
survived to this day, we can see that, as the importance of time is
discovered and grows, each poet is led to give it ever more personal,
living features.
We shall shortly undertake an analysis in greater depth to see whether
there was indeed an Orphic influence on the Greek model of time. On
the other hand, we should like to add a few details to the idea that all
the tragic poets developed a subjective, singular conception of time.
From the works that have been preserved96 it does seem that none of
these bards developed an objective, let alone circular conception of
time, or took for themselves the lion’s share.97 Let us begin with a few
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
right time (kairos). To use a Latin term, we can say that this time is
the tempus of human beings, it is a singular time. Marcel Conche
describes this very well in his discussion of Greek time:108
For those who are “inside” time, it means having only a limited
lifespan, a share of time. It is here too that, for the Greeks, the notion
of “fate” (from a word meaning “share”, “lot”, and ,
be allotted), originally meant that everyone has only a limited share of
life, a share of time.
In sum, it seems that it is impossible to theorise or objectify time109
and, furthermore, that the objective, circular conception is unknown
to Greek tragedy, or to the epic and, by extension, to the Greek doxa.
Time seems consigned to subjectivity, or at least remains bound to the
action of a subject in situ; it is a singular tempus.
We can also return to Aristotle’s Poetics for a satisfying
confirmation of this position. It is truly surprising to note that Aristotle
does not discuss time at all in this work. It contains nothing that bears
any relationship whatsoever to the notion. Here is a semantic analysis
that gives no time whatever to time. If we accept, with Aristotle, that
the purpose of poetry is pleasure, it is easy to understand that time has
nothing to do with it.110 Pleasure is never deferred, it is instant and
arranged in space, the spatiality of theatre that denies the temporality
of the book.111 Indeed this is why a tragedy must remain within the
frame of a single “circuit of the sun”112 in order to be staged. We
should state that this single occurrence of time in the Poetics does not
in fact separate the tragic genre from the epic, which does not have the
same constraints of space and hence of time, as Victor Goldschmidt
indicates:113
The well known instruction (ignored throughout the rest of the
treatise) concerning the revolution of the sun does not seek to describe
the time of tragedy, which has its own measures that depend on the
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114 In this passage we are responding to what seems to us a highly partial attack by
Florence Dupont who, in her pamphlet Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental
(Aubier, 2007), suggests that Aristotle disembodied tragedy.
115 The Hymn to Hermias shows that Aristotle was no novice as a poet. Cf. Jaeger,
Aristotle…, pp. 116-117. It was this hymn that led to Aristotle’s condemnation at the
end of his life.
116 Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote, p. 400.
117 Id. p. 407.
118 Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s poetics…, 1957, p. 575, n. 15, cited by Goldschmidt.
119 Indeed in On the Soul III, 3, 428a 20-24, p. 681, Aristotle says, “But opinion
involves belief (for without belief in what we opine we cannot have an opinion), and
in the brutes though we often find imagination we never find belief. Further, every
opinion is accompanied by belief, belief by conviction, and conviction by discourse
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of reason, while there are some of the brutes in which we find imagination, without
discourse of reason.”
120 Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote, p. 418.
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our current conceptions onto that poetry; the greatest mistake remains
the confusion of western monotheism with Greek polytheism. In the
polytheist Greek religious conception, all individuals had their own
time marked out by the cycle of nature; so everyone was free to have
their own conception of time which, however summary, was
appropriate to their individual lives. Conversely, monotheism implies
that all individual tempera are subject to an objective time, a divine
Chronos.121 Olivier Boulnois, introducing the famous canonic
Sentences of Peter Lombard, repeats the mediaeval monk’s statement
dating from the end of his noviciate, describing the coupling of the
Christian God with objective time. God is presented as bound to time,
emasculating all its attributes and blocking any development:122
In his wisdom he locks up, fixes and perpetually holds back all time,
past, present and future, undergoing neither the coming of anything
new nor the passing of anything past.
So the divine kronos of Christianity requires all individual human
tempera to be subject to it and the construction of an objective time to
represent it (clocks, calendars of the saints, the ringing of bells)
becomes inevitable. In order to mask Greek polytheism, Hegel based
his Christian God on the figure of Cronos, repeating the attempt at the
fusion of monotheism and polytheism made by the Neoplatonists.123
This process of unification seems to have started with Cicero (106–43
BCE), with his research on Saturn related to Hesiod’s Cronos and the
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124 Cicero, De la nature des dieux, II, XXIII, XXVIII & II, XXIV-XXV, French
trans. E. Bréhier, in Les Stoïciens, La Pléiade, 1962, notably pp. 431-432.
125 Seneca, De beneficiis, IV, 7.
126 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll. 510-520, trans. G.M. Cookson. See also Jean
Frere’s article ”Avenir et moïra: d’Homère à Platon“, in L’avenir, actes du congrès
de l’association des Sociétés de philosophie en langue française, Vrin, 1987, pp.
181-185, p.184. Frere cites a passage from the Eumenides, “For all-seeing Zeus and
Fate herself have worked together for this ending”, vv. 1045-1047, p. 184.
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130 Cf. Saussure, op. cit., p. 67, “I call the combination of a concept and a sound-
image a sign”.
131 Aristotle, On Memory 449b 10-11, trans. Barnes, p. 714.
132 Jules Vuillemin, Eléments de poétique, op. cit., p. 53.
133 Xenophanes, fragment B 18, trans. Kathleen Freeman.
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134 Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de l’éternel retour, Gallimard, 1969, p. 139. See also
Moses L. Finley, The use and abuse of history. London, 1975, pp. 14-16, cited by
Eva Cantarella, “Introduction à l’Odyssée”, in Odyssée, Les belles lettres, I, 2001, p.
XVIII. For a more in-depth exploration of this issue, see Vidal-Naquet, “Temps des
dieux et temps des hommes”, Revue d’histoire des religions, 1960, p. 55 ff.
135 Gilbert Bouchard, L’Odyssée d’Homère, Introduction, Société des Ecrivains,
2001.
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136 The text was probably later reworked to create yet more different versions.
Grammarians such as Zenodotus of Ephesus (320–240 BCE), Aristophanes of
Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 BCE) worked on this text in
order to standardise it. Lastly, it is likely that the most stable version is the work of
Aristarchus.
137 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, 1900.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/lectures2.htm
For Thucydides, see Vuillemin op. cit., p. 83.
138 Plato, The Republic, X, 598d 9.
139 Cf. Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, trans. R.C. Seaton, Simon & Brown
2013, and The Orphic Argonautica, trans. Jason Colavito, Jason Colavito, 2011.
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140 Pietro Pucci, “Le cadre temporel de la volonté divine chez Homère”, in
Constructions du temps dans le monde grec ancien, pp. 33-48, p. 45.
141 Homer, Iliad, I, 5, cited by Pietro Pucci, in “Le cadre temporel de la volonté
divine chez Homère”, art. cit., p. 33, this English trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin,
1992, p. 77.
142 Conche, (op. cit., p. 34.) repeats the view expressed by Paul Mazon in
“Introduction à l’Iliade”, Iliade, les Belles Lettres, p. 299. He finds the same
distinction in Emile Brehier’s Histoire de la Philosophie I, p. 298, which he
mentions “the Semitic idea of an omnipotent God governing the destiny of human
beings and things, so different from the Hellenic conception” (cf. p. 32). For further
discussion of these questions, see Barnes, “La doctrine de l’éternel retour”, in Les
stoïciens et leur logique, Brunschwig (ed.), Paris, 1978, pp. 10-11.
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143 Ibid., p. 33. Cf. René Schaerer, L’homme antique et la structure du monde
intérieur d’Homère à Socrate, from which he takes the following passage: “Man is
free within divine frameworks, and the gods are free within the frameworks of fate”.
But how could human freedom “delay the will of Zeus”?
144 Jean Frere, “Avenir et moïra: d’Homère à Platon”, in L’avenir, actes du congrès
de l’association des Sociétés de philosophie en langue française, Vrin, 1987, pp.
181-185, p. 183.
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145 It is for these reasons that St Thomas Aquinas adopts the traditional angelology
that had held pagan polytheism together, cf. Louis Rougier, “Le polythéisme païen
et l'angélologie chrétienne”, appendix to his French translation of Celsus’s The True
Word, Celse Contre les chrétiens, Copernic, 1977, p. 245. Aquinas was called the
angelic doctor precisely because study of the angels finally and definitively silenced
the problem of pagan polytheism in Greek thought.
146 Cf. Plato Meno, 80d and 80e. Aristotle proposes the following analysis of this
apparent aporia: “The puzzle in the Meno will result; for you will learn either
nothing, or what you know.” Posterior Analytics A, 1, 71a 29-30, trans. Barnes, p.
114.
147 We should note that the Athenians did not take part in the Trojan War. The
Athenian compilers cited cheated on this point, by adding their names to the list of
combatants.
148 In the Odyssey, Homer reveals the etymology of the Greek name Odusseus, cf.
I, 67; V, 340, 423; XIX, 275. Apparently it is derived from odussomai, meaning “to
get angry”.
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149 Evanghélos Moutsopoulos has also analysed time on the basis of the notion of
interval, suggesting that in Aristotle’s work kairos is simply “goodness in time” in
Variations sur le thème du kairos de Socrate à Denys, Vrin, 2002, p. 66 As an
introduction to this notion, see Nichomachean Ethics, A4, 1096a 26 and Eudemian
Ethics, A8, 1217b 32, 37, 38.
150 André Mercier, “Discours de synthèse de l’entretien d’Athènes, 1986”, Chronos
et kairos, Vrin, Institut international de philosophie, 1988, pp. 66-74.
151 Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, PUF, 1982, p. 29.
152 Lambros Couloubaritsis, “Le temps hénologique”, in Les figures du temps,
PUF, pp. 89-107, p. 95.
153 Moutsopoulos observes, “So it is absurd to claim that, as time plays no part in
the One, the One is time itself. Here the commentator (Proclus) raises a
contradiction with regard to the One that dates back to the Pythagoreans and
Orphics: supposing that the One is the first cause, the Pythagoreans attributed him
with the name kairos, cause of what is opportune, necessary and useful, in other
words good”, ibid., p. 140.
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154 Schuhl, La Fabulation platonicienne, p. 77. The model of the spindle seems to
be a technical metaphor for the mechanism of heaven. The truth involved here is
thus that of the harmony of the heavenly model and the circle would stem from the
revolutions of the planets. Did Penelope ask the stars when Odysseus would return?
155 Nietzsche, “Of the Vision and the Riddle”, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, 2, p.
178.
156 A dwarf is a little man, in other words, a child.
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However, the fact that Penelope has a spindle does not mean she has
the measure of time. On the contrary, she seems to use the spindle
only as a ruse to fend off the advances of her suitors.157 So Ananké’s
spindle seems to have lost its sacred meaning; Penelope is not
Artemis,158 Odysseus still less Apollo. Yet it remains true that this
circular time of Oriental origin involving waiting does describe the
non-heroic time which Homer’s texts must organise through the
character of Odysseus. So the hero seems to carry an unfolding time, a
temporality whose measure young Athenians must copy. We still need
to provide a definitive explanation of this.
While we have accepted that the design of the supreme god Zeus
is implacable, like that of a sole god, unlike that of a sole god it is
limited by lesser gods. And while everything has been set out in
advance, the relationships between these gods, focused on Odysseus,
is dramatised in Book 1 of the Odyssey:159
All the gods pitied him except Poseidon, who pursued the heroic
Odysseus with relentless malice until the day when he reached his
own country.
Poseidon, however, was now gone on a visit to the distant
Ethiopians, in the most remote part of the world, half of whom live
where the Sun goes down, and half where he rises. He had gone to
accept a sacrifice of bulls and rams, and there he sat and enjoyed the
pleasures of the feast. Meanwhile the rest of the gods had assembled
in the palace of Olympian Zeus, and the Father of men and gods
opened a discussion among them. […]
“What a lamentable thing it is that men should blame the gods and
regard us as the source of their troubles, when it is their own
transgressions which bring them suffering that was not their destiny.”
In our view this passage, also cited by Nietzsche, is the symbolic
matrix of the entire narrative. It is to poetry what the postulate is to
mathematics. We note that Poseidon does not even take the trouble to
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160 It takes Poseidon four strides to reach his intended goal, his tekmôr, Iliad, XIII,
20.
161 We should add that, like Zeus and Hades, Poseidon is the son of Cronos and
Rhea. The three drew lots for shares of the Olympian World, with the result that
Zeus took the kingdom of Heaven, Poseidon the kingdom of the Sea and, as Hades
could not demand the kingdom of Earth, which was occupied by human beings, he
inherited the kingdom of the Underworld. This distribution makes clear that this is
not a cosmogony, since the Earth is left to human beings (and also high Olympus,
according to Homer, Iliad XV, l. 185). Secondly, as Heaven covers both Earth and
Sea, Zeus becomes the supreme God. Lastly Poseidon and Zeus have equal power
because they are brothers of equal strength, which is why Poseidon can take his time
standing up to Zeus.
162 Homer, The Iliad, XIV, 85 ff.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
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166 We should note that the term “term” also indicates this bound, the impossibility
for a notion to have a boundless polysemy without de facto disappearing. On the
semantic problem of conceptualisation, see Aristotle, Metaphysics, , 106b.
167 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Le cercle des liens et les ruses de
l’intelligence, Champs, Flammarion, 1974, p. 145.
168 Detienne and Vernant, Le cercle des liens et les ruses de l’intelligence, p. 271.
169 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 2, 1357b 1-10, trans. Barnes.
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Of signs, one kind bears the same relation as the particular bears to the
universal, the other the same as the universal bears to the particular. A
necessary sign is an evidence, a non-necessary sign has no specific
name. By necessary signs I mean those on which deductions may be
based; and this shows us why this kind of sign is called an evidence:
when people think that what they have said cannot be refuted, they
then think that they are bringing forward an evidence, meaning that
the matter has now been demonstrated and completed; for the word
peras has the same meaning as the word tekmar in the ancient tongue.
So while Aristotle’s concept of time, which relies on the notion of
péras, may be conceptually independent of the historical tradition, it
still seems that the semantic median term tekmar, taken from the epic
genre, provides its traditional foundation. “That which possesses the
end” (entelechy) is that which possesses the limit “peras”, the bound
“tekmôr”, but not yet the end “télos”. The concept of “télos” adds a
vectorial dimension to the notions of “peras” and “tekmôr”, which we
shall consider in the next part.
170 Aristotle’s lost treatise On Poets seems to have been written for the education of
Alexander the Great. Homer’s place at the heart of this treatise clearly shows that his
work was the foundation of all education.
171 Conche, Temps et destin, Editions de Mégare, 1980, p. 83.
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whom the hero must contend, as in polytheism, or the sole god’s field
of action, as in monotheism, in both cases it opens up conceptual
possibilities for philosophical analysis. The field of possibility
covered by this notion also invalidates the deceptive analogy of time
with a geometrical line or mathematical sequence.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
Naked truth, drawn out of the inmost sources, is the object of the epic
poet: he depicts to us merely the tranquil existence and working of
things according to their natures; his object lies already in each point
of his movement; therefore we hasten not impatiently to an aim, but
linger with affection at every step.
Letter from Schiller to Goethe, 21 April 1797 175
175 In his next letter of 25 April, Schiller continues: “The tragic poet must stride
forwards more rapidly and directly, while the epic finds his account more in a
loitering gait. It follows also from this, as it seems to me, that the epic does well to
abstain from such subjects as powerfully rouse for themselves the feelings, whether
of curiosity or of sympathy, in which case, then, the action interests too much an end
to keep itself within the bounds of a mere means.”
https://archive.org/stream/correspondencebe01schi/correspondencebe01schi_djvu.txt
176 Heraclitus, Fragments, DK, B40, trans. Freeman, op. cit.
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177 Ours is a structural approach, in the Saussurian sense of the word. According to
Saussure’s notion of value, every term takes its meaning from what it is not. The
notion of value supports the void of the Concept, Cours de linguistique générale,
Tulio de Mauro (ed.), Payot, 1972, chap. IV, 224-245, pp. 155-169. Similarly, the
value of a culture is all that it is not; in short, its value will be all the greater if it is
able to receive other cultures.
178 Pseudo-Plutarch, De Homero, § 2, cited by Alain Ballabriga, “Hérodote et
l’histoire de l’épopée”, in op. cit., pp. 325-339, p. 328.
179 The source of this legend is thought to be a text by Alcidamas, a disciple of
Gorgias, entitled “The Contest of Homer and Hesiod”, cited by Ballabriga,
“Hérodote et l’histoire de l’épopée” in Constructions du temps dans le monde grec
ancien, pp. 325-339.
180 Reynal Sorel, Critique de la raison mythologique. Fragments de discursivité
mythique. Hésiode, Orphée, Eleusis, PUF, 2000, p. 68, note 1.
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Moïra assigns, subjects every person to the lot that falls to them by
inexorably fixing the rules of sharing.
For, as we have noted, Greek fate is indeed:181
The limit assigned to each person’s rightful share.
Having clarified and confirmed this, we need to take this process of
definition further. In the epic context fate seems linked to more
specific, singular notions. Sorel then gives us the following valuable
indications:182
It is in its association with the idea of death that moïra finds its most
frequent use in the Iliad (27 associations in 45 occurrences). Homer’s
phrase about a man struck a lethal blow is “red death (thanatos) and
imperious fate (moïra) closed his eyes.” However this meaning
disappears in the Odyssey (8 uses compared to 60) in favour of the
idea of custom, rights and natural order.
What does this mean? Simply that, while in the Iliad moïra remains
divine and cannot be judged by human beings, in the Odyssey, human
beings have clearly acquired some grasp of fate. The notion of moïra
then becomes coupled with those of rights and natural order, in short
with the kosmos, which is of a different order from that of the
Olympian gods. Frère explains that this semantic shift arises in part
out of a comparison between fate and necessity (Anankè).183 Fate as a
single entity is replaced by an attempt to understand time by means of
rationality. Anankè looks at human beings, and now time also “looks
at” human beings. It is easy to see that if rationality is integrated into
the notion of fate, this will naturally introduce discontinuity. It is the
discontinuity of rationality that provides the notion of interval that we
have mentioned. Within this interval, it then becomes necessary to
organise all the parts and it is at this analytical level that the notion of
kosmos becomes necessary.184 We can see it becoming established in
Hesiod’s work.
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The myth of races adopted in Works and Days confirms the shift from
a fateful, divine justice to which human beings must submit to a
justice placed in human hands. The transmission of justice
(dikaïosunè) to human beings is correlatively the moment when they
must become the bearers of time. Hesiod binds justice and time
together around the notion of fate (moïra). So exchange becomes the
medium of time and justice (dikè), as we shall seek to show by
discussing the well-known myth of races.185 In Hesiod time is linked
to the notion of justice solely through the mediation of humanity.
Human beings bring justice to humanity (dikè) and, if this justice is
integrated into a world that already posesses time and a certain notion
of justice (Thémis), it is because Pandora has already done her work.
For in Hesiod the notion of justice is not linked to time from the
outset, but arrives only when Pandora (the first woman) introduces
sexuality and thus human temporality (tempus). Moroever this is in
accordance with the Cosmogony, which gives justice (dikaïosunè/
Dikè) a secondary place.186 Here is Darbo-Peschanski’s analysis:187
In the works, when the moment comes to dress the first woman, it is
often forgotten that the Hours officiate alongside Athena, the Graces,
Persuasion and Hermes, arranging garlands of spring flowers around
Pandora. The Hours are the three daughters of Zeus and Themis
(Fairness): Eunomia (Right sharing), Eirênê (Peace) and Dikè
(Justice), whose theogony describes the emergence – following
mention of its resolution by force (biêphi) – of the conflict between
the Olympians and Titans and the division (diedassato) of honours
among the Immortals undertaken by Zeus immediately afterwards.
Justice (Dikè), Peace (Eirênê) and Fair distribution (Eunomia) are
merely the three daughters of Zeus, who has long sought to make
retains its link with that of aesthetics (main source: Brague, La Sagesse du Monde.
Histoire de l’expérience humaine de l’univers, Fayard, L’esprit de la Cité, 1999, p.
31, notes p. 265.).
185 We have already noted that Aristotle’s Protrepticus was a response to the
Antidosis of Isocrates. There is an early dialogue entitled On Justice in the
Aristotelian corpus, but it deals with justice only in the political sphere and so
cannot shed much light on the relationship between justice, fate and time; see Paul
Moraux, A la recherche de l’Aristote perdu. Le dialogue “Sur la justice”, Louvain-
Paris, Publications universitaires de Louvain-Nauwelaerts, 1957.
186 Briefly we can say that justice is done in exchanges between human beings
(dikè), that justice resides within human beings, as a virtue (dikaïosunè), and that
these two forms of justice are subject to an objective Justice (Thémis), understood as
a harmony between humanity and the time of the heavens (Zeus).
187 Darbo-Peschanski, “Historia et historiographie grecque: Le temps des hommes”,
in Constructions du temps dans le monde grec ancien, pp. 89-114, p. 98.
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188 Sophocles, Ajax, l. 293, cited by Barbara Cassin, “Aristote avec ou contre
Kant”, in Penser avec Aristote, p. 365, note 15, this English translation R.C.
Trevelyan.
189 Brisson, Les mots et les mythes, p. 44; once again this is the myth of the war of
Atlantis. For an analysis of this myth, see Mattéi, Platon et le miroir du mythe, chap.
IX, pp. 251-281. (The island of Atlantis was the first son of Poseidon).
190 We recall the words of an Egyptian priest to Solon: “Oh Solon, Solon, you
Greeks are all children, and there’s no such thing as an old Greek” Plato, Timaeus,
21, 22. Plutarch confirms: “All that lying Greece has dared to record”, cited by Vico,
Origine de poésie et du droit. De Constantia jusrisprudentis, Café, Clima éditeur,
1983, p. 77. Vico himself wonders, “How could it be regretted that the Greeks did
not know the history of foreign peoples, when they had such little knowledge of the
more distant events of their own history?”
191 Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or Cosmos and History, trans. Willard
R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 1954, pp. 124-125.
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ages: gold, silver, steel, and “mixed with iron”. The same metals are
mentioned at the beginning of the Bahman-Yašt (I,3), which, however,
somewhat further on (II, 14), describes a cosmic tree with seven
branches (gold, silver, bronze, copper, tin, steel, and a “mixture of
iron”), corresponding to the sevenfold mythical history of the
Persians.
The Persian origins of this mythology are now well established, as
attested by other contemporary work, such as that of Schuhl and Paul
Mazon.192 It also seems that the members of Plato’s Academy were
aware of this influence, through Hermodorus’ work on Zarathustra.193
The myth bears the stigmata of traditional mythology, principally a
nostalgia for origins.194 It is said that there was a golden age, long
long ago, at the start of a Great Year whose length of 18,000 solar
years195 prevents any possible return.196 After an unfortunate and
inoportune (a-kairos) fall, human beings went through phases of
decline (the four materials) until they were no longer able to control
their lives and constantly longed to return to their original state
without any possibility of doing so, as shown in the myth of Sysyphus,
son of Aeolus. As cosmic time is not on the human scale, the circular
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203 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, II, 385. Cited in Some Aspects of the Life and
Work of Nietzsche, and Particularly of his Connection with Greek Literature and
Thought, trans. Arthur Harold John Knight, Cambridge University Press, 1933:
http://tinyurl.com/oknm8xl. A little earlier Nietzsche provided the axiom
underpinning this argument: “If the motion of the world aimed at a final state, that
state would have been reached. The sole fundamental fact, however, is that it does
not aim at a final state; and every philosophy and scientific hypothesis (e.g.
mechanistic theory) which necessitates such a final state is refuted by this
fundamental fact”, trans. Kaufman, p. 371.
204 This theory of the rings can be linked to the character of Nathan the Wise,
devised by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) in an attempt to reconcile the
three monotheistic religions. Lessing tells the story of an Oriental who had a very
valuable ring, which he wanted to bequeath to his three children, the three
monotheisms. As he could not cut it in three, he decided to have two copies made,
so that he could give the same to each of his children. Quarrels broke out over who
had the original ring, before it was realised that the real ring lies in the heart, the
religion of the heart. Nathan concludes, “If only I had found in you one more, a man
worthy of the name!” Lessing, Nathan le sage, French translation R. Pitrou, II, V,
1993, p. 171.
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205 Jean-Marie Lardic, considering the endless chain of circles at the end of the
march of the mind in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, suggests, following
Feuerbach, that “If the infinite is the negation of a stage every time, this may seem
to contradict its affirmative nature, mentioned many times by Hegel. We seem to be
engaged in a kind of infinite progress, representing the wrong infinity.” L’infini et sa
logique. Etude sur Hegel. L’Harmattan, 1995, p. 103. And indeed, why should the
progress of the mind culminate in the spiritual figure of the sage? Why should the
concrete universal not end in concrete materialism? This was how it was read by
Karl Marx in a historical reading that was in tune with Hesiod’s myth in a way that
Hegel’s conception of history, rooted in Christian spirituality, was not.
206 It was the Maguseans who introduced Iranian eschatological conceptions to the
Greeks, as we shall see at the end of this section.
207 Bouton, Temps et Esprit dans la philosophie de Hegel de Francfort à Iéna, p.
269.
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208 Cf. questions 73-80 solved by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica op. cit..
The synthesis of these questions is taken from Catherine Pickstock, “Thomas
Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist”, Modern Theology 15, 2, April 1999, pp.
159-180.
209 However, we should be clear that the concept of faith remains attached to
Christianity in Hegel’s philosophy. This is where the analogy between Greek and
Germanic culture ends: “The very word faith is reserved for the Christian religion;
we do not speak of the faith of the Greeks or Egyptians, or of faith in Zeus or Apis.
Faith expresses the internality of the most profound, concentrated certainty.” We
should also note that the term “religion” enters history following the Protestant
separation of “reason” and “faith”. In this sense Hegel’s philosophy must clearly be
placed within the direct line of this religious ideology. See also Bernard Bourgeois,
L'idéalisme allemand, alternatives et progrès, Vrin, 2000, pp. 79-94. (The preceding
quotation from Hegel is taken from page 85.)
210 Bouton, Temps et esprit dans la philosophie de Hegel, Vrin, 2000, pp. 168-169.
211 Hegel, Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press,
1975. The French translator of the same text (10/18, 1965) Kostas Papaioannou,
observes that here, as elsewhere, Hegel confuses Cronos with Kronos, cf. French
edition, note, p. 215.
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political god from whose head Pallas Athena sprang and to whose
circle Apollo and the Muses belong, was able to check the power of
time; he did so by creating a conscious ethical institution, i.e. by
producing the state.
The same is true in The Philosophy of Nature in his Encyclopaedia:212
But it is not in time that everything comes to be and passes away,
rather time itself is the becoming, this coming-to-be and passing away,
the actually existent abstraction, Chronos, from whom everything is
born and by whom its offspring is destroyed.
In Hegel’s work Greek time is always linked to the figure of Cronos
as revealed in Hesiod’s myth of races. For Nietzsche the myth of races
simply confirms his conception of the eternal return, whereas Hegel’s
thought reveals that, on the contrary, this myth allows time to unfold.
How is this possible?
To understand what is happening behind the scenes in this myth,
let us start by returning to Plato. For we cannot be sure that Hegel read
Hesiod directly; he may simply have used Plato’s theories relating to
him. At any rate, Hegel’s version is highly Platonic. Firstly, Plato’s
conception of the heavens is far from simple and, while it may be
circular, it is important to grasp how he understands the spherical
nature of time. In his Timaeus,213 Plato starts by describing the
movement of the soul in two different circles: the circle of the same
(intelligence and science) and the circle of the different, the place of
opinion. These circles are in opposition, since the circle of the same
manifests the indivisible (continuity), whereas the circle of the
different manifests the divisible (discontinuity). Both the circles
within the soul and the conceptions that gravitate around their
differences are based on conceptions of the heavens. Plato applies
conceptions of the heavens to conceptions of the soul; the heavens
cannot be understood without the soul and vice-versa. So what is
Plato’s conception of the heavens? Mattéi provides some initial
information:214
The heavenly sphere turns towards the right of the universe, while the
planets move leftwards. Plato in his turn teaches that the circle of the
same turns horizontally towards the right, while the circle of the
different turns obliquely leftwards (Timaeus, 36c).
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215 Aristotle attests to the influence of Cratylus on Plato: “For, having in his youth
first become familiar with Cratylus and with the Heraclitan doctrines (that all
sensible things are ever in a state of flux and there is no knowledge about them),
these views he held even in later years”, Metaphysics, A, 6, 987a 29-b7, trans.
Barnes.
216 Aristotle criticises the thesis that “panta kai aei” in his Physics, VIII, 253b 10-
11, trans. Barnes, “The view is actually held by some that not merely some things
but all things in the world are in motion and always in motion, though we cannot
apprehend the fact by sense-perception. Although the supporters of this theory do
not state clearly what kind of motion they mean, or whether they mean all kinds, it is
no hard matter to reply to them.” See also Topics, I, 11, 104b 21 and On the Soul, I,
2, 405a 25-28. According to Jean-François Pradeau in Héraclite, Fragments, since
the work of Kirk these fragments have no longer been recognised as authentic by
contemporary translators Diels and Marcovich. Pradeau says, “This opinion is
foreign to Heraclitus in such an indeterminate, simplistic form”, p. 51.
217 Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, p. 86: “The myth of The Statesman
can be read as a Platonic reworking of Hesiod’s narrative.”
218 Plato, The Statesman, 272e, trans. Robin Waterfield, Cambridge University
Press, 1995, p. 26.
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to earth as seed as often as had been ordained for it. Then the
helmsman of the universe released the tiller, so to speak, and
withdrew to his vantage-point, and both fate and its innate longing
made the universe start to move backwards.
Plato presents this myth in two parts. The first part describes the
golden age and the first race, the second part describes all the stages of
decadence. After the golden race, the world separated from the
heavenly sphere and went into reverse. This was also the moment of
divine withdrawal, which left human beings at the helm.219 But the
withdrawal was not complete; an observation post remained, seeming
to indicate that the divine might slip out from the wings and back onto
the world stage.220 Hegel seems to have put his faith in Plato and used
this account as the basis for his new conception of history. But does
Plato’s intepretation of Hesiod’s myth conform to the text itself? The
contemporary Hegelian Bouton suggests:221
Plato modified Hesiod’s account of the theogony, turning the simple
succession from Chronos to Zeus into an endless cycle. As a result,
the myth of the statesman lays the foundations of a cyclical
conception of time, which Hegel uses precisely to understand the
history of ethical life: the oscillation between birth and destruction no
longer refers to two major periods of the universe, but forms the very
rhythm of the temporal life of peoples.
That Plato destroyed much of Greek heritage (Democritus), modified
a number of conceptions (Heraclitus) and transformed many
philosophies (Pythagoreanism) has already been demonstrated.
However, we are not yet persuaded that Plato’s reading of Hesiod is
too partial in every sense.222 In his discussion Plato peddles several
219 This myth of divine withdrawal (contraction) can be found in the kabbalist
conception of tzimtzum (tradition). We can see this in Chaim Vital (1543-1620) and
the Lurianic Kabbalah. In Vital, Ohr Ein Sof (“the light of the Lord”) is linked to the
world by a straight line that also breathes in the Four Worlds of emanation, creation,
formation and action.
220 Nietzsche speaks of the Captain in the Blessed Isles, Anaxagoras mentions the
helmsman and Plato mentions the presence of the pilot. Here we are in the
metaphorical register of the representation of Zarathustra, who seems to have come,
or to be coming, by sea, like the Persians on their malevolent ships. In the world of
Ancient Greece there was a mythology of the macabre ferry, described by
Moutsopoulos in his article, “Un instrument divin, la navette, de Platon à Proclus”,
Kernos, 10, 1997, pp. 241-247.
221 Bouton, Temps et esprit dans la philosophie de Hegel, p. 86.
222 Here Bouton is perhaps following the interpretation of Brague, who suggests:
“Plato transforms a simple succession into a cycle: sometimes Cronos governs the
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ideas that should give us pause. In the first place, the universe is
described as naturally (“innate longing”) moving “backwards” – in
short, “bad”. Moreover, the universe itself is said to have a “fate”.
Crucially, the relationship of all this to the soul indicates that this
conception of circular time serves the doctrine of metempsychosis.
Plato shows that souls constantly fall into bodies and are reborn, in
other words that they return to the cycle of metempsychoses. Plato’s
passage, more coloured by Pythagoreanism than it seems, also tells us
that there is no salvation possible for souls. Sorel suggests, however,
that souls may be able to save themselves through regular visits to
places of worship where they can top up their life force – their thûmos
(vital energy):223
Conversely, Orphic ceremonies were bound to recall the birth of the
world, the theogonic struggles and the myth of the tearing apart of
Dionysus. They retraced the loop linking Dionysus to Phanes, evoking
the golden age (immortality), its fragmentation (wheel of births) and
reunification (return to the golden age).
We shall discuss the relationship between Dionysus and Zarathustra a
little later on. Here we can note that the presence of Dionysus shows
that we are in the Orphic register, which will indeed be that of Plato’s
interpretation. In sum, let us say that the circularity of Hesiod’s myth
of races is not only possible, in order to retain its Persian origins and
internal consistency with the cosmic ages, but, crucially, attested by
Plato’s version, perhaps produced under the influence of Orphism.
Moreover, we shall find this circular understanding of the myth of
races in the Neoplatonist Proclus, the last great teacher of Plato’s
Athens School.224 At least this is what Sorel tells us:225
A passage from Proclus states that there were two generations
(geneai) before the race that emerged from the dismembering of
Dionyus: a golden age under Phanes and a silver age under the
dominion of Kronos. This succession of ages loses its diachronic,
contradictory nature when it is associated with the cycle in which the
end is the beginning. Dionysus is Phanes: the follower of Orpheus
returns to the golden age at the end of his purification, the silver age
when he forgets himself in murder, violence always being associated
entire world, sometimes he only reigns over some places, ‘as is the case now’” ibid.,
p. 86.
223 Sorel, Orphée et l’orphisme, PUF, 1995, p. 107.
224 Proclus (412, 485) was the last divine of the Athenian School. After him the
School split into the Aristotelian tendency of Marinus and the Platonic tendency of
Isidore.
225 Sorel, Critique de la raison mythologique, p. 114.
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with Kronos. These ages are not anterior to the “current” age. They
exist solely from the point of view of the purity or impurity of the soul
presented to Persephone. Temporal linearity is merely a shrinking of
the mind resulting from ignorance which, in the Greek understanding,
remains merged with forgetting.
This all remains obscure. However, Sorel ultimately accepts that it is
possible to understand this myth as circular and furthermore that such
an interpretation seems most in tune with the original. Its conformity
with the myth’s Persian origins indicates that this is the best
interpretation. So we shall retain the view that there are two possible
readings of this text, one linear, the other circular, and go on to seek a
tipping point or fork that might explain this interpretative “biphony”.
Our focus will be the relationship between justice and time, an
association of divinity with temporality that must be understood in all
its subtlety.226
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
228 Cited by Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, p. 90, note 40. Luc Brisson
also compares these men to a “human flock”.
229 The English “Paradise” comes from the Latin paradisus, itself derived from the
Greek paradéisos. This term is thought to come from the Avestan pairi-daeza,
meaning “enclosure”. This would explain the quest for an enclosed land, the
conception of Paradise as an island or archipelago. See also Jean Delumeau, Une
histoire du Paradis, I, Fayard, 1992.
230 Aristotle, Constitution of Athens XVI, 7, trans. H. Rackham, Heineman and
Harvard University Press, 1935.
231 Aristotle, Politics, VII, 15, 1334a 31 and ff., and the Protrepticus, fragment 12,
as we have seen.
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starry sky. In our view this is why Zarathustra is said to be the adorer
of the stars. And it is this conception that is discussed in Aristotle’s
Protrepticus, from the opening part of which we take the following
passage:232
This is the thing for the sake of which nature and the god engendered
us. So what is this thing? When Pythagoras was asked, he said, “to
observe the heavens,” and he used to claim that he himself was an
observer of nature, and it was for the sake of this that he had passed
over into life. And they say that when somebody asked Anaxagoras
for what reason anyone might choose to come to be and be alive, he
replied to the question by saying, “To observe the heavens and the
stars in it, as well as moon and sun,” since everything else at any rate
is worth nothing.
The total materialism proposed by this vision of the golden age
reflects the fact that the finished man is surrounded by perfection in
re. For this reason thought, culture and, still more, philosophy and
spirituality are all unnecessary. All these things are already in the
thing in itself, in the full sense that Kant gave it,233 in re, if we are to
follow Leibniz. In the Iranian conception, the universe is perfect, it is
fundamentally good. However, remaining in the garden of Cronos
which is the concrete, manifest vision of this state, it is easy to
understand that it has no room for thought. What is the point of a little
universe in one’s head (spirituality)? What is the point of a philosophy
or theory of the world that is merely that world’s pale reflection? It is
a lack of understanding of this resolutely materialist dimension of the
oriental Paradise – in this case the Persian vision of the world –
differing so greatly from the later vision of the Christian Church, that
apparently leads Vidal-Naquet to say, with a rare lack of finesse:234
The Paradise of the golden age is ultimately an animal Paradise.
Humanity, including that of the philosophers, is on the other side, that
of the cycle of Zeus.
This conception is followed by Brague, whose work we have cited.235
Did Hesiod get it wrong? No, as everything is entirely “in actuality”
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or pure to use the concept Aristotle uses to describe the divine, there
are no more spiritual and intellectual journeys to be made. More
radically, it can be said that there is no longer any need for the western
vision of the world. So why on earth do Plato and Aristotle place
philosophy within this realm? To understand this we must first present
the heroic age. More precisely, what is the significance of Cronos, the
guardian of this strangest of ages? Sorel takes up the commentary of
Heraclitus the rhetorican:236
Kronos scythes: his epithet anklulomêtês “of the twisted thinking”, or
“of the curved thinking”, a description attested in Homer, precisely
gives his cast of mind the curved shape of the castrating sickle.
Kronos scythes the unhindered fertility of his progenitor, this excess
of vitality (thaleros) that is paradoxically at once necessary to
begetting and incompatible with the orderly cycle of life
The root of the name Ks (with an initial kappa) is said to be ker
(to cut), which would be consistent with his epithet anklulomêtês.237
However, it is generally accepted that Cronos was never said to be the
god of time Xs (khronos ou Chronos, with an initial capital letter)
by the Greeks, notably Homer,238 and that he is thus unconnected to
the notion of time s (chronos, all lower case).239 However, Sorel
notes that while the fusion of the two is not clearly made by the poets,
it is explained by an examination of the theologians. Between the 4th
and 5th centuries BCE the term chronos has many different meanings,
as we have seen in presenting our mosaic of poetry. But as soon as we
link Cronos with the Orphic god Phanes, all suddenly becomes
that philosophy is absent from the life of plenty of the time of Cronos, when it
would have been supremely necessary.”
236 Sorel, Critique de la raison mythologique, p. 53.
237 Sorel, Les Cosmogonies grecques, p. 42. The Greek root ker is also thought to
be the root of the term kairos.
238 Homer, The Iliad, IV, 59.
239 Sorel initially thought that this confusion in Hegel’s philosophy between
Cronos and Chronos came from the Neoplatonists, as suggested by Romilly (op. cit.,
p. 36), see Les Cosmogonies grecques, p. 83: “It seems a confusion was introduced
after the event by the Neoplatonist philosophers between the word chronos (with an
initial khi) and the name of the Titan Kronos (with a kappa), who had in fact never
signified time. It is certainly the case that the word chronos is never found as the
subject of a clause in Homer. On the other hand, if we place the expansion of
Orphism between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, we are bound to observe that this
period corresponds to the rise of many conceptions concerning time.”
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
240 Sorel, Orphée et l’orphisme, PUF., 1995, p. 49. The god Phanes is derived from
the Greek phainô, meaning “to make shine”, “to reveal”, “to appear”.
241 Sorel, Orphée et l’orphisme, PUF, 1995, p. 53. He carries the billhook skêpron
of sacred individuals, according to the etymology given by Emile Benveniste.
242 Pindar, Olympian Odes, II, 77.
243 Plato, Cratylus 396c, cited by Sorel, Les cosmogonies grecques, p. 35. Hesiod
always gives Ouranos the epithet asteroesis, meaning “starry”.
244 Hesiod, Cosmogony, ll. 178-182, trans. Dorothea Wender, Penguin, 1976.
245 Sorel, Les Cosmogonies grecques, p. 42.
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246 The positivity of what is to come (‘à venir’ in French) in the religious context is,
in fact, its negation (‘a-venir’ in French, with a privative “a”), precisely because
time is understood as circular.
247 Chronos is associated not with the Roman Saturn but with Janus, who left the
memory of the golden age, celebrated in the Saturnalia. The two faces of the door
are found on Janus’ own face in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
248 Aubenque, Le problème de l’Etre chez Aristote, pp. 73-74.
249 Jean Brun, Aristote et le Lycée, PUF, 1961, p. 26.
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The Silver Age. Hesiod tells us that this is an inferior race (polu
kheiroteron), attesting to the state of decline. Cut off from the circular
time of Ouranos, the men of the silver age seem to lack direction.
They are completely caught up in an a-kairatic time; they are still the
children of their own time, whose measure they do not yet have.
Chronos is a young adult and his world seems wobbly, like a toddler’s
gait. Hesiod describes men as not living much past their adolescence
and remaining children for a very long time (“at his good mother’s
side a hundred years”250), before dying as aged youths. Unlike the
men of the golden age they suffer many misfortunes, for they do not
want to adore the gods, nor even to make sacrifices on the holy altars,
when, Hesiod says, this would seem to be a human duty. They scorn
the law, which explains their hubris. Thus they are bound to disappear.
Chronos suffers the same fate at the hands of Jupiter as that he meted
out to Ouranos. So all in all the silver age is the time of a-kairos and
hybris that leads to the bronze age. Hesiod then introduces the Bronze
Age, with the first race of men forged by Zeus himself.
These men are presented as exaggeratedly bellicose. Benefitting
from a robust physique that gives them indefatigable power and
strength, they are frenzied and violent with hearts as hard as bronze.
These men seem to have become aware of their bodies or, rather, seem
to have regressed to the point where they can no longer control even
their own bodies. As for thought and justice, both are out of the
question in this age. Here we see the full extent of the decline they
represent. The men of bronze truly are animals and it is in relation to
them and them alone that we might ask whether they have any
humanity left. Hesiod states that they are almost men no longer, as
they “ate no bread”.251 However, Sorel tries to rescue the human
nature of this race, suggesting that they are the first who truly know
death:252
The bronze race open the way to the post-mortem fate reserved for
almost all the humans to come: falling into the mouldy realm of
Hades, where they disappear “leaving no names”.
One thing is certain, the souls of these men do not migrate elsewhere
after death. They are mortal, in the manner of the animals to whose
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notes that none of Homer’s heroes actually has his soul transported to
the Isles of the Blessed, apart from Menelaus, who brings back Helen.
This idea seems absurd, poetic, a somewhat featherbrained conception
we might say today, reflecting the pejorative aspect with which poetic
activity has been lumbered since being undermined by Plato’s
ideology. Yet, if this mythology is circular, it is hardly surprising that
it involves a return to the first phase, in other words the golden age.
The golden age is the place where the Greeks deploy the heroes,
which obliges us to accept that even the Greek version proposed by
Hesiod shows that we are dealing here with circular time. But this is
not said explicitly. Hesiod seems to be hiding this circular dimension,
just as he hides from mortals the real destiny of the heroes going to the
Elysian Fields. We should also note that this vision of heroism makes
it possible to understand why Plato and Aristotle think that the
philosopher should be located here. Philosophers are heroes and as
such it will be up to them to attain the new golden age. It is here that
we find the fork where the myth’s circularity and linearity separate.
Linearity says there must be a direct transition from the silver age to
the iron age, as the fall of man follows a line all the way down, if that
is where we are going. This means there are only four ages, in
accordance with the Persian tradition, with the heroic age reduced to
an intermediate age, a divider separating what goes on into the iron
age (evil, the iron earth), from all that goes back to the Isles of the
Blessed (good). Circularity then becomes good, while linearity is evil,
as Hegel also said. This is the traditional thesis of the negation of
linear unfolding time, which this myth contrasts with the circularity of
tradition. However, the irreversible descent towards the iron age is not
obligatory, heroism makes it possible to close the circle, to avoid
entering the iron age and thus to return to the golden age.
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255 “Pythagoreanism is one of the many mystical sects that developed in Southern
Italy throughout the 6th century; it had close links to Orphism” adds Schuhl in
Essai…, p. 242.
256 What is certain is that Orphism cannot be Egyptian in origin, as there are no
notions within it that are comparable to that of “metempsychosis”. The source of this
confusion is a misunderstanding by Herodotus, as stated in a note below.
257 Sorel, Orphée et l’orphisme, p. 75.
258 Orphic fragment no. 208. All these fragments were collected in the Orphicurum
fragmenta edited by Otto Kern, Berlin, 1922, Weidmann, 1972.
259 Reincarnation is a belief adopted by Plato, Plutarch, Plotinus and Proclus. It is
rejected, as we shall see, by Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicurus and St Augustine. On the
basis of two accounts by Diogenes Laertius, it was long thought that the belief “that
the soul survives death and passes into other bodies” (I, Prologue, trans. Hicks) was
of Egyptian origin, while Herodotus says: “The Egyptians were the first who
maintained the following doctrine, too, that the human soul is immortal, and at the
death of the body enters into some other living thing then coming to birth”, The
Histories, Book II, chapter 123, trans. A. D. Godley. However, as Sorel rightly
notes, it was not present in the Egyptian theological conception: “The Egyptian
initiate mentally performed mutations (kheperou, passage from one form of being to
another) to get closer to Atum: he was not embodied in any manifest form”, Orphée
et l’orphisme, p. 81, note 1. However, Xenophanes of Colophon (DK 21b7) and
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
to the idea of the blessed life in the golden age in the reign of Cronos.
This mythological relationship seems again attested by the following
Orphic fragment:267
This is what those who are initiated by Orpheus to Dionysus and Kore
pray that they may attain, “To cease from the wheel and breathe again
from ill”.
We should moreover note that it is on the Pythagorean tablets that we
find the greatest number of reflections of this conception. These
tablets were found on the bodies of the dead, either inside or beside
their tumuli. Most of these texts, for the most part inscribed on bronze,
begin with a statement of thirst,268 a call for the spring, and then the
following statement:269
I am the son of the Earth and the starry Heavens.
It is only in some of them that we read what we are looking for here,
an account of exit from the cycles of reincarnation:270
I flew out of the circle of terrible, crushing suffering, nimble-footed, I
reached the longed-for crown, I sank into the bosom of the queen of
the underworld, I descended nimble-footed to the longed-for crown.
The end of the cycle, the escape from the circle, these are effective
conceptions that describe the singular change undergone by the
singular souls of the heroes, which initiates seek to copy as best they
can to ensure the same destiny for themselves. However, we have yet
to understand the theoretical model that explains the destiny of these
heroic souls. On this point the poet Pindar sheds his own light, in a
267 Orphic fragment no. 230, cited by Sorel, Orphée et l’Orphisme, p. 89.
268 See Schuhl, Essai…, p. 241: “I am dried out with thirst and I am dying, but
quick, give me the cool water that flows from the lake of “Memory”. And of
themselves they will let you drink from the divine spring and after that you will be
in command among the heroes”; is there also a hierarchy of heroes?
269 Anne Lebris, La mort et les conceptions de l'au-delà en Grèce ancienne à
travers les épigrammes funéraires. Etude d'épigrammes d'Asie mineure de l'époque
hellénistique et romaine, Chapter V, “Les séjours de l'immortalité bienheureuse”,
pp. 61-80, l'Harmattan, 2001.
270 Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, Les lamelles orphiques. Instructions pour le
voyage d'outre-tombe des initiés grecs, Les Belles Lettres, 2003, p. 106; French
translation of this lamella by Bernadette Leclercq-Neveu. Schuhl’s translation
replaces “the queen of the underworld” with “Our Lady”: “I flew out of the terrible
cycle of profound pain, my nimble feet reached the longed-for circle and I nestled
beneath the breast of Our Lady, queen of here below.” (Kern, II, C, Diels, 66B,
18).”, in Essai…, p. 240.
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271 Pindar, Threnodies, fragment 133, preserved in Plato’s Meno, trans. Beresford.
A threnody is a song of mourning.
272 All these conceptions seem to have been retained by the Jewish tradition. The
tree of the sephirot has a crown (Kéter) and the ten terms of the Tetracktys also
appear. See Salomon Ibn Gabirol, Kether Malcouth (la couronne royale), French
translation from the Hebrew by Paul Vuillaud, Dervy-Livres, 1984 (1953).
273 On Timon see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, I1, 9.
274 Diogenes Laertius, trans. C.D. Yonge, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent
Philosophers I, 2., available at:
https://archive.org/stream/livesandopinions00diogiala/livesandopinions00diogiala_d
jvu.txt
In Diogenes we also find the fragment of Aristotle’s Protrepticus: “When somebody
asked Anaxagoras for what reason anyone might choose to come to be and be alive,
he replied to the question by saying, ‘To observe the heavens and the stars in it, as
well as moon and sun’ p. 48.
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So we can see that the gathering of all souls to remake the mutilated
body of Dionysus goes hand in hand with a quest for order. All
acknowledge that the notion of kosmos comes from the Orphic source
and notably from Pythagoreanism.275 But it is less historical to
recognise that this notion, in the sense of organisation, is radically
esoteric.276 These souls will become the Mind that wanders through
the air, so we must assume that they are still looking for the way to the
Isles of the Blessed. But let us go a little further. We seem to be close
to the root of our questioning. Let us pose one last question: who is
the hero, also called Mind, who will take on the name Soul of the
World in Plato and who will later be found in the philosophy of
Plotinus and others until the philosophy of Hegel? We would suggest
that in Plotinus’ philosophy, the Soul of the World is paired with the
notion of Providence via the notion of Mind, with its organising
intelligence, as promoted by Orphism. Henri Crouzel, an expert on the
philosophy of Plotinus, offers the following interesting synthesis:277
The Soul of the World governs the stars, through the intermediary of
the souls of the individual stars, as we shall see. According to Plato it
guides everything with reason. It is this soul that produces the
succession of events, relations of cause and effect, foreseeing and
knowing what will follow.
Furthermore, in his Enneads Plotinus gives this Soul of the World the
name “universal reason”.278 So this linkage of future (Providence),
reason (noûs kubernétès) and mind (objective time stemming from the
heavens) cannot be understood independently of its Orphic source.
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279 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 36, trans. J. Sibree and particularly the
Hegelian slogan: “This plan philosophy strives to comprehend.”
280 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VIII, 31, trans. Hicks.
281 So it comes as no surprise to note St Augustine finds a way out of this dualism
after reading Aristotle’s Protrepticus, in the version in Cicero’s Hortensius, since
Aristotle leaves this conception behind from the outset in his philosophical work.
282 Sorel, Orphée et l’orphisme, p. 54.
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The Iron Age. Sappho will open the door to us. The Iron Age is the
world here below, as the Christian vulgate would say. It is hell on
earth. Whether the origins of all this are Median or simply Orphic, the
proselytic message always culminates in a powerful call to belief that
plays on human weakness. This is how Sappho ends the life of a poor
Greek woman who lacks religious cultivation:283
When you are dead you will lie forever unremembered and no one
will miss you, for you have not touched the roses of the Pierian
Muses. Invisible even in the house of Hades, you will wander among
the dim dead, a flitting thing.
Ordinary mortals, prudent as they should be, are better advised to do
their duty and take themselves off to a place of worship – those places
where hope is sold cheap, or at least at a better price than the classes at
the philosophy schools, which were reserved for the elite, in both the
Orphic cults and the public Eleusinian cults. So we need to understand
that Hesiod’s myth gives a framework to religious conceptions that
were key to the Greek cults and to Pythagoreanism. Hesiod’s myth
283 Sappho, Fragment 63, in Poems and Fragments, trans. Stanley Lombardo,
Hackett Publishing Company, 2002.
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284 Schuhl observes, “But after Pausanias (VIII, 37, 5), it is only Onomacritus – the
chresmologist who lived at the court of Pisistratus and was caught in the act of
falsifying the prophecies of Musaeus (Herodotus, VII, 6) – who made the Titans,
whose name he took from Homer, authors of the passion of Dionysos.” op. cit., p.
230.
285 Aristotle, Metaphysics, B, 4, 1000a 8-14, trans. Barnes.
286 For Syrianus ambrosia symbolises the separation of the created world and nectar
the fact of not being fascinated by things here below, 41.30-42.12.
287 Metaphysics A, 4, 984b 31-32, trans. Barnes. According to Syrianus, the use of
obscure language by Hesiod and the theologians can be explained by the fact that
they are not trying to pass on teaching, but to speak of an inspired path, 42.12-16.
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In short, the Iron Age, said to be the age in which human beings
currently live out their lives (“For now truly is a race of iron”),289is
horrible. In the service of the cults Hesiod the mythologist paints it as
black as possible, masking reality in a veil of shadow cast over the
world of the present (ideological nûn). In this last stage of decadence
and humanity’s fall, linear time excludes return, circularity is wrecked
on the shores of atheism and human beings are condemned with no
possibility of appeal. Hesiod describes these people as endlessly
working and shrouded in suffering day and night, at the opposite
extreme from the golden age they have failed to reach because they
failed to believe in the gods. Filial relationships, friendship and
exchange are things of the past. Worse, young people scorn their
parents and elders, while adults respect neither justice nor law and are
without virtue. Worse still, honour is paid to vice, rapine, odious tricks
and calomnies – in sum to Evil. And the wicked do all this without
any sense of guilt. Darbo-Peschanski offers the following insightful
interpretation:290
These people do not die from being suddenly struck by death. They
die from having no time left. If their children are born old and their
lineages, stripped of ressemblance, are shattered by disparity and
produce more continuity, this is because they have lost the impulse to
change, which enabled them to stretch out the time from their birth to
their death: not only has the mechanism for the exchange of gifts that
underpins hospitality, other social relations and those between gods
and men ceased to operate but justice has become confused with force.
No salvation without initiation! Without initiation human beings are
unable to take on their own time, acquire continuity in the world and
think of the future. All these things are given to them by the cults,
without which they will fall back into animality, replacing justice with
force. This is the traditional message of the theologians. However,
there is an admission of failure on the part of the divinity in Hesiod,
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since, like the others, this race will disappear. In bringing justice to
humankind, at every stage of his creation Zeus seems to get it wrong.
Once again, he will be obliged to destroy this race that is unaware of
the functions of his three daughters Justice (Dikè), Peace (Eirènê) and
Fairness (Eunomia). But is it time that these people lack, or justice? In
the Cosmogony of Hesiod our mythologist, time precedes justice by a
long way, since Zeus created the world long before he engendered his
three daughters, who are precisely a product of this world.291 Besides,
have any of these four races taken responsibility for justice?
Absolutely not. The worst of them, the race of the Silver Age, does
seem to have been the first to concern itself with justice, but this
concern was rooted in an impossibility that ultimately led to its
downfall. Can we follow Darbo-Peschanski’s tragic observation?292
So, in giving human beings Justice, Zeus does not offer them an
entirely positive gift; instead he renders them endlessly out of step
with the divine order, while they must seek to reduce this gap on pain
of death, without the moment of that death being clearly determined.
So he gives them their own chaotic time, which goes from just to
unjust deeds and which, because justice cannot be universally
eliminated, leads to the uncertainty of the hour of death. The human
future is linked to human actions, it is moved by the impossibility of
controlling the dyssymetry of justice. So it appears – and this is a
constant in Greek thought – as a devaluation, not only of divine
eternity, but also of cosmic regularity.
Indeed it seems that all these stages are ultimately subject to the same
observation of divine impotence. The castration of Cronos triggers a
string of castrations, yet divine law still does not turn human beings
towards justice, peace and fraternity. They have been granted time in
the hope that it would have that effect, but seemingly to no avail. For
Hesiod time is circular and the development of humanity must be kept
within the framework of the future of the religion he promotes. This is
also the view of the poet Aeschylus, writing, with very Greek irony:293
Prometheus: I took from man expectancy of death.
Chrorus: What remedy (pharmakon) found’st thou for this
malady?
291 Sorel suggests that “The Iron Age was the first to be plunged into the meanders
of coming-to-be”, in Critique…, p. 63.
292 Darbo-Peschanksi, “Historia et historiographie grecque: ‘le temps des
hommes’”, art. cit., pp. 89-114, p. 103.
293 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll. 248-251, trans. G. M. Cookson, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1922.
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294 The notion of kairos is often replaced by the ideal life of the peasant farmer,
which is found only as an example in Hesiod’s Works and Days. This might be
amusing, were the same naïve view of time not also inscribed on the headquarters of
the UN, in a maxim taken from the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and translated as
“Convert the steel of your arms into ploughshares.” To which we might reply, all
right, but when? The notion of kairos has been debased since the time of the Stoics
at least, and that is what makes the work of Moutsopoulos so exemplary.
295 On this see the most recent book by Moutsopoulos, Variations sur le thème du
kairos de Socrate à Denys, Vrin, 2002. Poseidippus, c. 330 BCE, gave the following
description of the statue of kairos by Lysippos: “Who and whence was the sculptor?
From Sikyon. / And his name? Lysippos. / And who are you? Time who subdues all
things. / Why do you stand on tip-toe? I am ever running. / And why you have a pair
of wings on your feet? I fly with the wind. / And why do you hold a razor in your
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If Aristotelian time does not adopt this idea of a religious end (télos),
the resulting questions seem to form an inextricable knot. What time
could be independent of these sacred notions? With what conceptions
of the “end” could they counter the religious approach? On what
source could Aristotle have drawn for his own model of time? Before
rushing to the corpus to find the various descriptions of time, let us
note once again that, in every case, time is always dependent on its
“motor”, which seems a priori to be located at its term, in other words
in conceptions of the “end”, the télos. This is why we do not think
Aristotle’s time can be discussed without a consideration of the
concept of entelechy. Are all sacred dimensions truly absent from this
concept, as we provisionally assert in the present study? This is far
from certain. Indeed it may be that Aristotle’s public discourse on the
end is not entirely in tune with his underlying beliefs. This is another
right hand? As a sign to men that I am sharper than any sharp edge. / And why does
your hair hang over your face? For him who meets me to take me by the forelock. /
And why, in Heaven's name, is the back of your head bald? Because none whom I
have once raced by on my winged feet will now, though he wishes it sore, take hold
of me from behind. / Why did the artist fashion you? For your sake, stranger, and he
set me up in the porch as a lesson.” English trans. W.R. Paton, Love Epigrams, Loeb
Classical Library, 1898. See Chronos et kairos. Entretiens d’Athènes, 1986,
introduction by Moutsopoulos, p. 14.
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In the whole range of time past, so far as our inherited records reach,
no change appears to have taken place either in the whole scheme of
the outermost heaven or in any of its proper parts. The name, too, of
that body seems to have been handed down right to our own day from
our distant ancestors who conceived of it in the fashion which we have
been expressing. The same ideas, one must believe, recur in men’s
minds not once or twice but again and again.
Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. Barnes, I, 270b 14-19.
298 Aristotle criticises the dichotomy stemming from division (diairein: diviser) in
many passages of his work; he even proposes, condescendingly where Plato is
concerned, that it is an “impotent syllogism”. So it is no surprise that the terms
Aristotle employs in criticising Plato’s dichotomy are the same as those Nietzsche
later used to demolish Hegel’s kenotic dialectic, cf. Prior Analytics, I, 31, 46a 31,
Posterior Analytics, II, 5, 91b 16, Metaphysics, Z, 12 1036b 27 and Parts of
Animals, I, 2, “Against the dichotomy”.
299 According to Plato, using dichotomy means leaving harmony behind forever.
Cf. Mattéi, L’Etranger et le Simulacre, Essai sur la fondation de l’ontologie
platonicienne, PUF, 1983, p. 204.
300 A stone is a “sign for the future”, a conception also found in Hesiod’s
Theogony, ll. 147-210; “vomiting up the stone” means permitting generation in op.
cit., pp. 172-173.
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together around the central point of the Heroic Age. We are bound to
note that the figure of the hero appears in both perspectives. In epic
and tragic poetry, it is the hero’s task to be a vector of the future for
the citizens (as Achilles and Odysseus are). Similarly, within religious
thought the end of the fall301 that is common to all the cults requires
the intervention of a hero who must go back through the concentric
circles in order to attain the crown of being himself, with initiates
seeking to follow Dionysus or Zarathustra down this heroic path.302
This knot typical of poetico-philosophical intellectual activity
must now be loosened by the intervention of an external element, a
peripeteia as the poets would say; the provision of proof takes rational
philosophy forward and out of a theoretical impasse. To this end we
shall briefly consider the Platonic synthesis of Greek ideas before
describing a current of thought whose remoteness from specifically
Greek questions we hope to show. By way of transition, we shall
suggest that, as Plato continues to side with the “Sicilian Muses”
without giving the “Ionian Muses” their rightful place – to borrow the
terms of his dialogue The Sophist (242 d) – his thought cannot offer a
way out of the problem and enable us to engage with the work of
Aristotle. His work will enable us to bring the religious current to a
close before considering the Ionian thinking to which Aristotle is
closer – at least at first sight. However, as we shall see and in line with
most of the preceding sections, while the religious philosophical
position is not adopted, ideas from it will be included in Aristotle’s
model of time. It is for this reason that, once again, a historical detour
seems necessary.
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303 The notion of a screen concept has its source in the work of Sigmund Freud and
describes the work of the imagination when the mind is in the grip of a deep
resistance.
304 According to Heidegger, the Greeks interpreted ousia (substance) as parousia
(pure presence). As we shall see, this thesis undermines the foundations of
Aristotelianism, according to which substance is engaged in time by an entelechic
movement, Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, p. 466, note 1.
305 Catherine Collobert L’être de Parménide ou le refus du temps, Kimé, 1993, p.
266.
306 Pindar, Pythian Odes, I, 46, trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien, 1990:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0033,002:1
307 Collobert, L’être de Parménide ou le refus du temps, p. 267.
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312 Edouard Des Places, Etudes platoniciennes, 1929-1979, Brill, 1981, pp. 83-98
(lecture delivered in Aix-Marseille entitled Platon et la langue des Mystères), p. 84.
See also p. 83: “Of all the Greek mysteries whose secrets were so jealously guarded,
those of Eleusis had the most profound influence. They were maintained until the
end of paganism and were already established in the 7 th or 6th century BCE.”
313 Aristotle, Ethique à Nicomaque, note 4 by Tricot.
314 On the relationship between the Areopagus and the cults, see three passages
from Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens III, 5; XXIII, 1; LVII, 1.
315 Where the epic texts are concerned, it is equally clear that while Orpheus guides
the Argonauts, it completely disappears from Homer’s Odyssey to make way for the
grey-eyed goddess.
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316 Proclus, Commentaire sur la République, dissertation VI, p. 95. Judaism makes
a distinction between the Ma’aseh Bereshit (account of the creation) and the
Ma’aseh merkabah (account of the chariot). Moses Maimonides in his Book of
Knowledge asks, “What is the difference between the action of the chariot and the
Work of Creation? The works of the chariot were not even taught to an individual
unless he was a wise man gifted with intelligence. […] Why were they not taught to
the multitude? Because every man has not the wide understanding to grasp and
clarify and explain the matters perfectly”, trans. H.M. Russell and Rabbi J.
Weinberg, Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1983, p. 11.
317 Since Tertullian the Greek term mystêria has been translated by the Latin initia,
which gave us the English “initiation”, and the Greek term mystêrion by the Latin
sacramentum, sacrament in English.
318 See Christian Sommer’s book, Heidegger, Aristote, Luther. Les sources
aristotéliciennes et néo-testamentaires d’Être et temps.
319 We shall cite only the following choice passage from Luther: “In this regard my
advice would be that Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, Ethics, which
have hitherto been thought his best books, should be altogether discarded”, cf.
previous note, p. 27, note 5.
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320 Need we repeat that in Nietzsche, for example, the conception of the future is
developed in the chapter “Of the vision and the riddle” of his Zarathustra, from
which we have cited many extracts? Better still, Nietzsche wanted to found “an
order of aristocrats, a kind of Templar Order”, see, La naissance de la philosophie à
l'époque de tragédie grecque, French trans. Geneviève Blanquis, Gallimard, 1969, p.
18.
321 André Motte, “Platon et l’idée d’espérance”, in L’Avenir, Congrès des sociétés
de philosophie en langue française, Vrin, 1987, pp. 295-298, p. 297. Motte states
that, when he wants to talk about the future, in overlaying this notion with that of
hope, Plato prefers to place the words in the mouth of Socrates.
322 Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque. Histoire
des mots, pp. 1101-1103.
323 Marie-Laurence Desclos, “Instituer la philosophie: le temps de la succession
dans le Parménide de Platon”, in Darbo-Peschanski (ed.), Constructions du temps
dans le monde grec ancien, pp. 223-252, p. 245, note 76.
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324 We also remember what Kant said about doctrines of emanation: “Now the
person who broods on this will fall into mysticism (for reason, because it is not
easily satisfied with its immanent, i.e. practical use, but gladly ventures into the
transcendent, also has its mysteries), where reason does not understand either itself
or what it wants, but prefers to indulge in enthusiasm rather than - as seems fitting
for an intellectual inhabitant of a sensible world - to limit itself within the bounds of
the latter.” The End of All things, trans. Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press,
2001, p 228.
325 Sorel, Orphée et l'orphisme, pp. 25-26.
326 Cf. Plato’s Critias.
327 Both Circe in The Odyssey and Hermes the psychopomp had a magic stick
which, as Vico has shown us, referred to astral divination.
328 Pindar, Threnody 6, cited by Sorel, Critique de la raison mythologique…, p.
152.
329 Plato, Euthydemus, 290c; Theaetetus, 149c, Charmides, 157 and 176b, The
Banquet, 202e, Laws, X, 933a, 908d, 909d.
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330 Jean-François Mattéi, “Les figures du temps chez Platon”, Les Figures du
temps, PUS, 1997, pp. 29-47, p. 30.
331 Mattéi, “Les figures du temps chez Platon”, Les Figures du temps, p. 31.
332 We shall not speak of mythological arché in describing Hesiod’s work since, for
the theologian poet, the concept was temporal. Hesiod is not Parmenides.
333 Plato, The Statesman, 272 e.
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334 Cf. Karel Thein, Le lien intraitable. Enquête sur le temps dans la République et
le Timée de Platon, Vrin, 2001.
335 The term totalitas temporis has been used since Thomas Aquinas.
336 Desclos, Instituer la philosophie: le temps de la succession dans le Parménide
de Platon, art. cit., p. 224, note 4.
337 Plato, Parmenides, 151 e-152b, trans. Samuel Scolnicov.
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the One. Furthermore, if we say there are two types of time, the
complex time of Ouranos and the immense time of the anthrôpoi, the
time of human beings and the time of the gods, does this division not
undo the equivalence of being and existence in Parmenides’
development? We know this would be the thesis of Plotinus, on which
we do not need to spend time here.338 Furthermore, our second book
will reveal the need to investigate the reciprocity of this proposition: if
time can split being from existence, can being and existence not
reciprocally split time? But such mediaeval considerations can wait.
Lastly, the Parmenides crucially stresses the notion of the moment, as
Brague notes.339 These issues are discussed by Aristotle in his Physics,
as we shall see. At that point we shall also investigate whether the
view that time was created at the same time as the world really is a
Platonic thesis and how the two notions fit together.340 In every case,
this thinking about time is not Platonic, but Parmenidian, and was
subsequently taken up by Aristotle and the entire philosophical
tradition.
It remains the case that while time is not subjected to any
process of definition in the Parmenides, the same does not seem to be
true of the Timaeus, a text that sees the emergence of the canonic
Platonic view that time “is a moving image of eternity”. In this well
known passage from the Timaeus, Plato uses the term aïon, translated
since Plotinus as “eternity”. Brague refines the usual translations in
order to give it a quite different definition. This term, he tells us, can
be understood as referring to “the world of divine ideas”, “the Verb”,
“Wisdom”.341 He then proposes the following definitive
interpretation:342
When Timaeus says of the heavens, the moving image of the aïôn,
that it moves according to a number that is aïônios, Plato gives us to
understand that the mobility of the sky stems from its nature as an
image and, reciprocally, because both aspects, images and mobility,
stem from number. The phrase means first that the heavens
perpetually follow their path and, crucially, that the number by which
338 Cf. Henri Crouzel, Origène et Plotin. Comparaisons doctrinales, Téqui, pp.
332-341.
339 Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, 1ère étude, p. 11.
340 At this stage of conceptual development see the article by Walter Mesch, “Etre
et temps dans le Parménide de Platon”, Revue philosophique de la France et de
l’étranger, 2002/2, Vol. 127, no. 2, pp. 159-175.
341 Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, 1ère étude, p. 19.
342 Brague, art. cit., p. 67.
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they are ruled is of the nature of the aïôn, in other words the soul of
the world whose numerical structure has precisely just been described.
According to Denis O’Brien, the term aidios could refer to “the visible
gods”, in other words the heavenly bodies, the stars.343 But is this the
register Plato draws on in order to think about time and the structure
of the world that is its matrix? Brague has no doubt that this Platonic
proposition cannot be understood without recourse to the number
mentioned in this passage. If time relates to number this is because the
world was constructed using mysterious numbers in the Timaeus; the
world continues its progress according to this numerical matrix.
Analysing the time of the Platonic world thus necessarily means
determining the nature of the number from which it stems. This is why
Brague goes on to identify possible numbers: the number of
constellations, spheres, or heavenly movements, the decade, and so
on. His article ends here, without settling the question of which
number it is. We might ask, is it not simply tautological to say, as
Plato does, that time is in the image of eternal time? Can time be
defined by time? We can only escape this tautology if we say that
there are two kinds of time that are qualitatively very different but
perhaps not quantitatively separate: the complex time of Ouranos and
the immense time of the anthrôpoi. The time of human beings is in the
image of the time of the heavens. So it will be for number to tell us
more about the time developed by Plato and most importantly about
this dichotomy.
Human beings cannot acccess the complex time of Ouranos,
since it is the time of the demiurge and the gods. Through the
intercession of the Italian Muses, in The Republic344 Plato suggests
that knowledge of this time is however possible by means of numbers.
The Muses know “what has been, what is and what will be”; they are
the guardians of time. The Pythagorean Muses guarded the secrets of
numbers since if they were to divulge them, the structure of the world
itself would be revealed to human beings. However, this passage in
The Republic enables us to conceive of these numbers, since they are
explicitly described. Jean-Luc Périllié, who works on the Pythagorean
heritage in Plato’s philosophy, has found in The Republic the
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while geometrical number is part of the human world. This thesis was
confirmed by Thein:349
The Muses then describe two “nuptial numbers”, although they
calculate only the second. The first, perfect number (teleios, 546 b5)
coincides with the period of divine generation. The Muses are silent
on “divine begetting” (546, b4), nor do they spend any time on
calculating the number that presides over it. The second number is
conversely presented in detail. This is the “geometrical number”
(arithmos geômetrikos, 546c 6-7) which governs the good and bad
birth of human beings.
There is a nuptial number that relates to the divine sphere and a
multitude of geometrical numbers for an understanding of the sphere
of human beings. This is also confirmed by the work of Nicomachus
of Gerasa, author of a book entitled Introductio Arithmeticae,
translated into Latin by Boethius in the 6th century and, in the 20th,
into both English and French.350 This mathematician also identifies the
intelligible number of the domain of the demiurge, and the
epistemonic number studied by mathematicians. But how might these
numbers describe time? Might there be an eternal number, the nuptial
or intelligible number, and a temporal number, the geometric or
epistemonic number? This number, as described by Nicomachus, is
not a discontinuous unit in a numerical series or a segment of natural
or geometrical space. It is351 “a flow of quantities made up of units”. It
would not be absurd to say that it is through the notion of “flow” that
number can acquire its temporal attribute. Michel Crubellier gives us
his commentary on this surprising form of number (the parentheses
indicate that this is a conjecture):352
(In the neo-Pythagorean literature on numbers we find descriptions of
arithmetical number as a flow, in other words a process in which
original unity emerges by itself and constantly becomes something
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353 The only common point of these two conceptions is the postulate of a “being”
produced by discontinuity, which is spatially manifested “as” a unit that is simply a
geometrical segment. Cf. Ioannis M. Vandoulakis, “Was Euclid’s approach to
arithmetic axiomatic?” Oriens-Occidens, 2, pp. 141-181, p. 143.
354 Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, 3ème étude, p. 137.
355 Plato, Cratylus, 396b cited by Jérôme Laurent, L’homme et le monde selon
Plotin, op. cit., p. 142. Plotinus repeated Plato’s word play on six occasions. Here is
Plato’s text as translated by Jowett: “Kronos quasi Koros (Choreo, to sweep), not in
the sense of a youth, but signifying to chatharon chai acheraton tou nou, the pure
and garnished mind (sc. apo tou chore in).” Mattéi is also right to insist on the non-
separation between the nuptial and geometric numbers, without which thought
would become caught in the Catharon, the name given to the historical movement of
Catharism (καθαρός: katharós) by a Dominican whose name remains unknown.
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time of the generation of the Gods, while the other figures (schema)
reflect the multiplicity of human beings. So there is no point opening
Aristotle’s Physics and going to the part dealing with time without
having first understood this historical set of concepts.
In short, if it were possible to reconstruct the perfect
geometrical number from geometrical number, it would be necessary
to examine the notion of harmony that seems to make a qualitative
distinction between the two. The enigma can clearly be moved from
the analysis of number itself to that of the harmony attributed to it.
And this means that the notion of harmony should enable us to
connect divine eternity, rooted in the nuptial number, to the
temporality of the world, rooted in geometrical number.
Carl A. Huffman of the University of Cambridge356 finds this
Pythagorean view that harmony necessarily comes from disharmony
in a passage from Aristotle’s Physics. Here is Aristotle’s Pythagorean
thought:357
For what is in tune must come from what is not in tune, and vice
versa; the tuned passes into untunedness – and not into any
undtunedness, but into the corresponding opposite.
So we should investigate the harmony that Aristotle mentions here in
order to understand the Pythagorean model adopted by Plato. To what
model is he referring? Does it stem from a particular field of
knowledge? Does it denote the world of music, physics or perhaps
astronomy? To enable us to describe this harmony we have only
Rose’s fragment 47:358
Harmony is heavenly, by nature divine, beautiful and inspired; having
by nature four parts.
We shall not dwell on the elementary material constitution of the
supra-lunary world in Aristotle (the four parts are the four elements, to
which must be added the fifth); we simply wish to note that formal
harmony is taken from a model of the heavens, which seems to come
from the Pythagorean heritage. More light may be shed on this
fragement by comparison with a passage of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
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equinox to the rising of the Pleiades, summer from the Pleiades to the
rising of Actarus and autumn from the rising of Actaurus to the setting
of the Pleiades.
We shall discuss the notion of equinox later. So we can assume that,
as the Pleiades made it possible to separate the seasons (time) and the
notion of kairos had the same common meaning in relation to time (its
root ker in fact meaning to cut), it was quite natural that the number
seven, from the seven stars, should act as an analogical shuttle
between heaven and earth. Whatever the case, we now know that this
group comprises 1400 stars, which relativises the value of such a
method, as Aristotle would also observe in his Metaphysics.369
And the Pleias we count as seven, as we count the Bear as twelve,
while other peoples count more stars in both.
Yet it remains the case that the year is divided into four seasons,
which are in turn subdivided by three in order to give twelve months,
while the cycle of the moon is divided into four to give weeks of
seven days. This division is also found in Plato, based on the
dodecahedron, and in Aristotle’s thought at the constitutional level.370
So while heavenly harmony was the prime model of harmony and the
numbered stars gave the numbers, these qualitiative numbers
remained different from quantative numbers. Aristotle makes this very
clear when discussing Pythagorean thought in Book A of his
Metaphysics:371
For the objects of mathematics, except those of astronomy, are of the
class of things without movement.
So here we are given a new criterion to use in distinguishing
geometrical number from the harmonised nuptial number.
Geometrical number has no movement, so it can easily be compared
to Euclidian number. However, the same cannot be said of numbers
taken from astronomy. Firstly, if these numbers are an assembly of
parts, they have acquired this property primarily by analogy with
constellations, as we have seen in relation to the Pleiades. And the
constellations are harmonious because each is a subset of the set of
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372 Cf. Jesper Svenbro, “L’égalité des saisons. Notes sur le calendrier hippocratique
(Du régime, III, 68)” in Construction du temps dans le monde grec ancien, op. cit.,
pp. 341-350.
373 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 6, 987b, 26-31, trans. Barnes.
374 Aristotle Metaphysics, A, 6, 987b, 25-26, trans. Barnes.
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But positing a dyad and constructing the infinite out of great and
small, instead of treating the infinite as one, is peculiar to him.
Aristotle seems to be saying that, instead of bringing intelligibility to
both number and the understanding of natural phenomena, the
introduction of dialectics merely makes the issues more complex. For
the Pythagoreans the infinite was a simple notion constantly related to
the heavens, whereas the introduction of the dyad seems to push it to a
level of abstraction which Aristotle visibly does not see as useful to
the theory. Why oppose great and small, leaving the dichotomy
endlessly moving and so opening the way to an infinite that seems
purely illusory? 375 Aristotle’s critique seems to offer no concessions.
In order to grasp this fully, let us turn to the Philebus, in which Plato
discusses the notion of harmony. This dialogue allows us to note how
far Plato has moved away from the Pythagorean approach. For instead
of starting with an analogical model (the heavens, music) to describe
harmony, Plato begins with the dialectic between the limit and the
infinite. This tension between the limit (péras) and the unlimited
(apeiron) creates a mixture (summixis). It is only then that number and
measure are applied to this mixed entity, an operation which:376
puts an end to difference and opposition, and by introducing number
creates harmony and proportion among the different elements.
Firstly, by introducing the dialectic Plato removes the “physiological”
dimensions of number, as the Pythagoreans would say, which were its
specific properties. So it no longer has any properties and becomes a
pure abstraction. Next he gives number a subordinate status in relation
to dialectics.377 This is why number is no longer linked to nature, but
applied to a mixture (summixis) arising out of dialectics. The pair of
dissonant opposites ends when a number can be applied to them that
turns them into a harmonious mixture that is geometrically
commensurate. At this point Anne-Gabrièle Wersinger rightly
wonders about the place of the tension between the great and small.
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What is the site of this dialectic? What is the true site of the mixture
obtained in this way?378
We are bound to ask, what can provide a home or site, sometimes for
the apeiron and sometimes for the quantitative limit?
Although Wersinger comes up against the same question as that posed
by our discussion here, our solutions will be very different. Her
answer draws on the musical model, centred on the notion of interval.
We cannot fault her analysis which, moreover, seems to accord with
Plato’s approach. We thus refer the reader to her book, to which we
have nothing relevant to add.379 However, from a purely theoretical
point of view, we do not think that this model is entirely appropriate to
the question posed. While the musical interval may be one of the
models describing the functioning of the dialectic, intervals are so
many and so diverse, that it seems unlikely that the musical interval
can contain them all. What does a geometrical interval have in
common with a physical interval, and what does the latter have in
common with a cosmological interval? In the first place we should
need to define the space that contains this interval, if there is one. For
it is generally agreed that within an interval there is space. But here to
advance a thesis so charged with consequences, we need a proof.
Moreover, Aristotle is known, as we shall see, for his refusal to accept
that there is a space between the bounds of an interval and it is this
gap, this void, that drives him to seek to define movement itself. For
Plato the space that is the receptacle of the interval is not the world
itself (nature) – in other words it is not a physical space, it is mixture
(summixis). This mixture is invisible and theoretical. Lastly it must be
understood that Plato’s work on harmonies, which sought to penetrate
the mystery of music within the cults, led to the dissolution of the
concept itself. These Platonic analyses diverted fundamental work in
the field of physics. It remains the case that the mixture, to which
number and measure are applied, shows that that nature (materia)
cannot be signata quantitate, as many Mediaeval commentators
recognised. The mixture itself is the “sign of quantity” and this is why,
symmetry aside, it is hard to see what could be a sign for number.
To stay with our investigation, there was a Pythagorean
dialectics that described physical phenomena, but it was of a physical
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followed by the stars, the sun and moon, and the Air and Aether which
were separated off. It was this revolution which caused the separation
off.
At the centre of the world there is a turning, whirling movement – this
is the model of perichoresis. This whirling led to the separation of
what are here called stars – the sun, moon and the regions of the
heavens such as the ether. Mind (noûs kubernêtês) makes it possible to
know the heavens thus formed by turning. Mind knows both the
separations that created its regions and the stars of which it is
constituted.
Clearly, Mind can rule the universe because it knows how it was
formed. Clearly also, Mind is able to rule the universe because it was
present at its formation. “Mind took command of the universal
revolution, so as to make (things) revolve at the outset”, says
Anaxagoras. So the beginning was inert. It is Mind that gave
movement to the heavens by propelling them into a particular
temporality. This is not linear time, since it is constituted by a turning
movement. Turning is a spatial metaphor that contains the model of
the temporality of the heavens and thus of the One. Why? Because the
heavens were inanimate until they were set in motion, and movement
brought them animation of a primarily temporal nature. This specific
temporality is not a circular movement because Anaxagoras clearly
states that “at first things began to revolve from some small point”. So
the One is not a totality encompassing all its elements, it is the
infinitely small that spreads intensively in the infinitely large. This
mode of propagation (to put it in physical terms) or participation (in
philosophical terms) is still always subject to the model of endless
turning. So the heavens are understood as infinitely large and this is
why the Pythagoreans also called them Aîon. Consequently, Mind
necessarily knows the past, since it was present at the formation of the
heavens, and the present, since it rules its constitution and the future.
Lastly it knows the end (the term of the future) of the heavens in
formal terms, without knowing their material end, since it seems to
have worked on a material that was already present. For, crucially,
when Anaxagoras suggests that it began with a very small point, this
implies, through the notion of size, that this dimension can be related
to other, larger units already present. So we cannot support the
interpetation proposed by Wersinger:386
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387 Mattéi, “Les figures du temps chez Platon”, in Les Figures du temps, PUS,
1997, pp. 29-47, p. 37.
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388 Mattéi, “Les figures du temps chez Platon”, in Les Figures du temps, p. 36, see
also “La généalogie du nombre nuptiale chez Platon”, Les études philosophiques,
1982, no. 3, pp. 281-303.
389 Joachim of Fiore’s thesis on time can be presented as follows: “This eternity
that was in God before all time is entirely unfathomable to we who come to be in
time. And the wisdom of men is dulled, sense and intelligence fail where, in his
hidden design, he has tried to create time, which was not for all eternity”, Psalterium
decem chordarum I, 5, 238 r, this translation from the French translation by Jean
Devriendt, doctoral thesis, Université de Strasbourg 2, 2001.
390 We use the term “age” of the World to refer to Hesiod’s model, which had five
ages according to the circular movement and four according to the linear movement,
as we have seen. Raising the trinitarian (3) question at this point seems to us highly
pertinent to an understanding of the history of the Christian church.
391 If this model were linear there would be a confusion between this and Hesiod’s
model of the “ages” of the world, so that the Iranian question of evil would ipso
facto have to be included. We would then have the answer to the question of the
external limit to the heavens, which would be Evil.
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identified, we will know the limit of the number ten and hence the
limit of the universe as glimpsed by the Pythagorean model adopted
by Plato. In his treatise On the Heavens Aristotle mentions this
Pythagorean conception, again referring to the antichthôn. We shall
cite the entire passage in order to avoid any accusations of distorting
either the thought of Plato and the Pythagoreans or Aristotle’s reading
of it:395
But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary
view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars,
creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre. They
further construct another earth in opposition to ours to which they give
the name counter-earth. In all this they are not seeking for theories and
causes to account for the phenomena, but rather forcing the
phenomena and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and
opinions of their own. But there are many others who would agree that
it is wrong to give the earth the central position, looking for
confirmation rather to theory than to the phenomena. Their view is
that the most precious place befits the most precious thing; but fire,
they say, is more precious than earth, and the limit than the
intermediate, and the circumference and the centre are limits.
Reasoning on this basis they take the view that it is not earth that lies
at the centre of the sphere, but rather fire. The Pythagoreans have a
further reason. They hold that the most important part of the world,
which is the centre, should be most strictly guarded, and name the fire
which occupies that place the “Guard-house of Zeus.”
The postulate of Aristotle’s argument is as follows: the extremity and
centre are both limits, in other words quantity (extension) is dependent
on quality. For if we have no parts, it is impossible to unify them or to
posit a set. So a qualitative part can play the role of a quantitative
extensive limit. Following the Pythagorean model, this expressive part
is necessarily located in the heavens. So we need to find a region that
corresponds to this “noble” part of the heavens. This region is igneous
and called antichthôn by the Pythagoreans. The fire that is at the
centre of the universe is the “Guard-house of Zeus”. Are there other
igneous regions in the heavens that are not the sun? The answer must
be no, only the sun is this igneous region of the heavens. So the sun is
at the centre of the heavens and the centre of the universe.396 As we
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shall see, Aristotle refutes this argument, suggesting that the Earth is
at the centre. So the antichthôn is the sun; quantitiatively it is the tenth
term, but qualitatively the first, since it is an expressive part – the
“noble” part, as the Pythagoreans would say. So in our view the term
antichthôn made it possible to conceal the heliocentrism implicit in
the Pythagorean model. It would also be possible to express this
conception in geometrical form if and only if the tenth term were not a
point but a straight line intersecting a three-dimensional form. So
Pythagoras’ tétracktys can be understood only if we say that there are
two interlocking three-dimensionsal forms, as the mathematician
Hamilton has shown (graph theory), the first formed of the three tips
of the triangles which together form a new summit which is that of a
tetrahedron.
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411 On the techniques of history writing which link men to legendary figures, see
Karin Mackowia’s article, “Les savoirs de Thalès et de Kadmos. Histoire et
représentation religieuses en Grèce ancienne”, Annales HSS, July-August 2003, no.
4, pp. 859-876.
412 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 3, 20-21, trans. Barnes.
413 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 5, 987a 10; A, 5, 987a 32.
414 See also Jaeger’s analysis in Aristotle. Fundamentals of the History of his
Development, p. 133.
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own seed produced fire, breath and water … and that of these –
divided into five regions – was formed another, numerous lineage of
gods, the one that was called “of five refuges”, perhaps meaning “of
the five worlds”.
The supreme God of his philosophy is called Zas and is “always”,
along with Chronos and Chthonia. It is Cronos who, with his own
seed, engenders fire, breath and water. After this time unfolds in five
regions which are the five “ages” of the world in Hesiod’s theogony.
So this conception is manifestly identical to that set out by Hesiod and
Iranian in origin. A fragment from the work of Celsus, less reliable
than the preceding fragment, confirms that Pherecydes was using
Hesiodic conceptions. This passage describes a struggle between
Cronos and the serpent Ophioneus, each represented by one of two
opposing armies:423
And Pherecydes, who was far earlier than Heraclitus, relates a myth of
an army drawn up in battle against another army, and says that Kronos
was the leader of one and Ophioneus of the other; he tells of their
challenges and their contests, and that they made agreements that
whichever of them fell into Ogenus should be the vanquished party,
while the party which drove the other out and conquered should
possess the heaven.
For Schuhl this episode is an explicit reference to a passage from
Hesiod’s Theogony (ll. 820-880) describing a struggle between Zeus
(Zas) and Typhon.424 Meanwhile Colli links it to the founding of
Orphism. We shall consider the source of Colli’s confusion.425 In our
view, these two fragments can reasonably be seen to indicate that the
thought of Pherecydes of Syros had an identical source to that of the
theologian Hesiod. Perhaps under the influence of the later Mithraic
synthesis, Cicero suggested that Pherecydes was the first to assert
“that the souls of men were immortal” and Pherecydes was later
described as a “disciple of Zaratas the Chaldean”.426 As we have seen,
423 Origen, Contra Celsum, 6, 42, trans. Henry Chadwick, Cambridge University
Press, 1965, pp. 357-8.
424 Schuhl, Essai…, p. 148.
425 Colli links this struggle between Cronos and Orphion (the serpent, Ourobouros)
to Cretan culture and thus to original Orphism (I, 382-383, 391-392). We prefer to
follow Schuhl in suggesting that this symbolism is linked to Pythagoreanism. There
are, moreover, many representations of divinities stemming from Iranian culture
showing this serpent in the context of the Mithraic heritage, as Brisson has shown
(art. cit., pp. 56-57).
426 Plutarch, De animae procreatione in Timaeo II. Cicero said, “Pherecydes, the
Syrian, is the first on record, who said that the souls of men were immortal”,
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Tusculanes, 1, 16, 38, Colli, 9 [B 5), Schuhl, Essai…, p. 250. In the same tradition
we should note that Origen, in the work cited previously, also seeks to link the
episode of the titanic struggle between Cronos and the serpent Orphioneus to
Egyptian culture: “This is also the meaning contained in the mysteries which affirm
that the Titans and Giants fought with the gods, and in the mysteries of the
Egyptians which tell of Typhon and Horus and Osiris.” Contra Celsum, trans. Henry
Chadwick, Cambridge University Press, 1953.
427 Jaeger thinks that Aristotle’s history as set out in his On Philosophy mentions
Hesiod, but no supporting fragment has survived, op. cit., p. 128.
428 Cf. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Zoroastre, Paris, 1948, a critical study and
annotated translation of the Gathas.
429 Considering Aristotle’s conception of the narrative presented in his Poetics,
Victor Goldschmidt suggests: “The nub involves constructing an inextricable
situation from which it seems there is no way out – just as a theoretical impasse
seems to close off all further lines of thought. Nevertheless, one is found that is
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The Ionian people had their roots among the Achaeans (Aχαΐα:
Akhaía), the people behind the Trojan War431), who were themselves
entirely unforeseeable (herein lies the power of the nub) and yet, looking back,
plausible and necessary,” in Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote, p. 404.
430 We should note that this was the branch of philosophy least explored by
Nietzsche, who stepped into the breach of Iranian studies and identified all the
consequences of the problem of Mazdaian heroism in a historically correct manner.
However, he did so to the detriment of the current we wish to discuss, although we
will concede that, while many Vedic texts were discovered in Nietzsche’s time,
studies on the peoples of the sea are far more recent. See Les philosophes
préplatoniciens followed by Les "diadochai" des philosophes, l’Eclat, 1994
(translated from the German by Paolo D'Iorio, Francesco Fronterotta and Nathalie
Ferrand).
431 In talking about the Achaeans Homer sometimes uses the term Argives, which
identifies the city of their culture, Argos (Aργος), and also Danaans or Dananaans.
Names used by the different cultures (Egyptian, Hebrew, etc.) who mention this
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436 Cf. Duris of Samos, Chronicles, Book II, for the preserved epitaph referring to
Pythagoras: “All wisdom is summed up in me. He who seeks to praise me should
rather praise Pythagoras, for he is the foremost on Greek soil. In saying this I speak
the truth.” Under the influence of his brother Lynceus, this pupil of Theophrastus
advocated an approach to history through the acts of great men, relegating historical
rigour and the linear time used by historians to a secondary level.
437 Herodotus, Histories, trans. George Rawlinson, 1858-60, 5, 57, LVII.
http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.html
438 Karin Mackowia, “Les savoirs de Thalès et de Kadmos. Histoire et
représentation religieuses en Grèce ancienne”, Annales HSS, July-August 2003, no.
4, pp. 859-876, p. 868. Mackowia sees Eretria as a symbolic space for the
intermediate assimilation of a knowledge that is not Greek.
439 Véronique Suys, “Le culte de Déméter Achaia en Béotie. Etat actuel des
connaissances”, L’Antiquité classique, 63, 1994, pp. 1-20, p. 6.
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440 Herodotus, Histories, trans. Rawlinson, 5, 58, LVIII: “Now the Phoenicians
who came with Cadmus, and to whom the Gephyraei belonged, introduced into
Greece upon their arrival a great variety of arts, among the rest that of writing,
whereof the Greeks till then had, as I think, been ignorant.” The Phoenician
alphabet, which originated in Byblos, was discovered on a sarcophagus of a king of
Byblos dating from the 12th century BCE. The Phoenician origins of our alphabet are
no longer in any doubt. All the references to contemporary studies on this matter can
be found in Mackowia, “Les savoirs de Thalès et de Kadmos. Histoire et
représentation religieuses en Grèce ancienne”, art. cit..
441 Schuhl, Essai…, op. cit., p. 230.
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The Parian marble tells us that it was Eumolpos, son of Musaeus, who
instituted the mysteries in Eleusis.
If Musaeus is the father of Eumolpos, as irrefutably attested by this
historical inscription, the legend ascribing a Thracian origin to the
mysteries of Eleusis, a legend probably established by the poet Olen,
collapses.447 The Achaean origin is moreover corroborated by a
further clue. Demeter still bears the epithet “Achaia” or Aχαΐα
(Akhaía), Αχαΐα (Akhaía), a reference to the Greek region north of the
Peloponnese known as Achaïe, a name derived from the Achaeans
(Aχαιοî: Akhaioí). So one source of Orphism, and by no means the
least, would seem to be the cult of Demeter, of Achaean origin.448 As
for the legendary figure of Orpheus, it is harder to know how to locate
his legendary status within history itself. At most, we can make a
supposition. The committee set up by Peisistratus had a member
called Orpheus of Croton. Should we add his name to the list of
forgers among whom the historians have already placed Onomacritus?
We do not know.
It remains the case that Orpheus, a founding figure of the cult
established by the tyranny of Peisistratus, was later used to push back
the religion of the Achaeans. There are two identified fragments that
reflect the meeting of Dionysus, of Iranian origin, and Demeter, of
“Phoenician” origin. This struggle is played out within the city of
Thebes itself. Let us first listen to Pindar’s lament:449
Was it when you raised to eminence the one seated beside Demeter of
the clashing bronze cymbals, flowing-haired Dionysus?
This fragment of Pindar shows that it was the poet’s task to make
Dionysus the equal of Demeter, which suggests that Dionysus was
less important or more recent. In any case, Demeter definitely
preceded Dionysus. While Colli tells us that the second fragment has
been identified, the process of attribution remains uncertain:450
Had I the lips of Orpheus and his melody / to charm the maiden
daughter of Demeter
447 This legend is said to come from Olen the Lycian, who was the first to dedicate
a hymn to an Achaea in Delos and to suggest that this Demeter Achaea had come
from the land of the Hyperboreans, according to Pausanias V, 7, 8. See also Suys,
“Le culte de Déméter Achaia en Béotie. Etat actuel des connaissances”, L’Antiquité
classique, 63, 1994, pp. 1-20, p. 7.
448 As we have seen, it was Onomacritus who linked the passion of Dionysos to
Homer’s story of the Titans.
449 Pindar, Isthmian, 7, 3-5; Colli 3 [A 3]).
450 Colli, 4 [A 13].
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This second fragment confirms the analysis based on the first. There is
a mention of the forcible bending of hymns to Demeter in order to
adapt them to Dionysus. In the rest of Greece in this period, the cults
nevertheless tried to maintain the presence of both Dionysus and
Demeter. At least this is what Suys suggests:451
For example, during the haloa, the sacred festival of the grape harvest
in December, the two divinities were jointly celebrated. In Corinth the
temples of Dionysus, Demeter, Core and Artemis all stood in the same
sacred enclosure (I.G.IV, 2003); in the Nymphon of Sicyon were the
statues of Demeter, Core and Dionysus (Pausanias, II, 11, 1); at
Thelpusa in Arcadia a shrine was dedicated to Eleusinian Demeter,
Core and Dionysus (Pausanias, VIII, 25, 2).
It is possible that in some of the Greek cults these two figures were
maintained without Dionysus taking precedence over Demeter. This is
confirmed by an inscription of the Roman period (I.G.VII, 1867),
found in Thespiae. The inscription mentions a certain Flavia, lifelong
priestess of Demeter Achaia, “descendant of those who established the
cult of Dionysus”.452 But Demeter was not worshipped in the cult at
Delphi, since once Dionysus had taken precedence over Demeter in
Thebes he became dominant at Delphi. At least this is what Schuhl
tells us:453
Apollo could hold back the flood only by channelling it: in Delphi
itself he had to allow Dionysus part of the space he had himself
conquered from Python. The year there was shared between these two
powerful gods, whose statues stood side by side on the pediment of
the temple.
So we begin to see that Pythagoreanism was a religious movement
whose aim was to fuse the cults. Indeed we have already found two of
these: the Iranian cult of Zurvan the starry and the Achaean cult of
Demeter Achaea. This was religious syncretism in the service of pan-
Hellenism and the tyranny of Peisistratus.454
451 Suys, “Le culte de Déméter Achaia en Béotie. Etat actuel des connaissances”,
L’Antiquité classique, 63, 1994, pp. 1-20, pp. 12-13.
452 Suys, op. cit. pp. 6 and 13.
453 Schuhl, Essai sur la formation de la pensée grecque. Introduction historique à
une étude de la philosophie platonicienne, PUF, 1949, p. 223.
454 Schuhl also says: “The delirium of the Sibyl is no more properly Hellenic in
origin than Dionysian enthusiasm. It was introduced into Greece by a religious
propaganda movement, which we know only by its results,” in Essai sur la
formation de la pensée grecque. Introduction historique à une étude de la
philosophie platonicienne, PUF, p. 138.
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455 Strabo, Geography, XIV, 1 - Ionia. Trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Loeb.
456 According to Homer, Neleus was born to Tyro in Thessaly and married Chloris,
daughter of Amphion, King of Orchomenus. He is said to have reigned in Pylos in
Messenia.
457 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers I, p. 51 (Thales). The
etymology of this city is said to be Nileus = Miletus.
458 Herodotus, 1, 170, 3, Colli, 10 [A4].
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in our view the most reliable and will underpin our historical reading.
Herodotus states that the conflict between Greece and Asia was started
by the Phoenicians (I, 1):
The Persian learned men say that the Phoenicians were the cause of
the dispute. These (they say) came to our seas from the sea which is
called Red, and having settled in the country which they still occupy,
at once began to make long voyages. Among other places to which
they carried Egyptian and Assyrian merchandise, they came to Argos,
which was at that time preeminent in every way among the people of
what is now called Hellas.
So the Phoenicians did first settle in Argos before migrating, some of
them to Ionia via Athens, others via Thebes, and apparently directly in
the first case. Herodotus says several times that these Phoenicians
were originally from Syria (according to Homer, I, 116). He even
locates Syria precisely between Arabia and Egypt (II, 5):
The road runs from Phoenicia as far as the borders of the city of
Cadytis, which belongs to the so-called Syrians of Palestine. From
Cadytis (which, as I judge, is a city not much smaller than Sardis) to
the city of Ienysus the seaports belong to the Arabians; then they are
Syrian again from Ienysus as far as the Serbonian marsh, beside which
the Casian promontory stretches seawards.
This is the now accepted place of the “sea peoples”. For this reason,
historically, when the Greeks spoke of the “Phoenicians”, they were
always referring to the Achaean Ionians. This is why we must be
cautious before advancing that the Ionians are Greeks and Thales is
the founder of a Greek philosophy. Politically speaking, this is
undeniably true, but it is doubtful from a philosophical perspective.
The philosophy developed by Thales is not Greek, its origins are
Achaean, Phoenician.
This confusion has been broadly fostered by the mythology of the
seven sages (σοφοί) of Ancient Greece, relayed by Diogenes Laertius.
But this mythology was unknown to the Greeks of the 6th and 5th
centuries BCE. It is the work of later historians. It is thought to have
been initiated under Egyptian influence468 by Demetrius of Phalerum
468 It seems that Demetrius of Phalerum is the source of the mythology of the seven
sages, as recorded by Plutarch. According to Colli (II, p. 121) he wrote a collection
on this subject, The Register of the Archons, and no other authors are known to have
written on this mythology before him. On this subject see also Nietzsche, The Pre-
Platonic Philosophers, p. 13, pp. 24-25.
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469 Plato, Cratylus, 343 a-b. It was Socrates who introduced a list of sages that
stopped at seven. This is another Platonic legend.
470 The fragments were preserved by the Church Father Eusebius of Cesarea. On
this subject see the work of Edward Lipinski, notably his book Dieux et déesses de
l’Univers phénicien et punique, Peeters, Brill, 1995, p. 60, note 12.
471 Cf. the work of Joseph Bidez.
472 For example, the cult of Byblos is already a syncretism of the Phoenician and
Egyptian gods. There is no Earth-Mother figure, but there is a “Lady of Byblos”,
linked to Astarte and Amon, the great God of Thebes; Lipinski, Dieux et déesses de
l’Univers phénicien et punique, p. 72, pp. 90-91. And then the epic of Gilgamesh
which originated here (Byblos) retains traces of the influence of the Babylonian
religions on this culture.
473 Eusebius of Caesarea, Preparatio Evangelica, I, 10, 18, also relates that Philo of
Byblos had made Persephone the daughter of Kronos who died a virgin, whereas in
the Greek tradition she is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, which is not a suitable
historical symphysis. However, it is true that it is hard to understand how Demeter
could have been coupled with Zeus. The historical realities show rather that the
Achaeans (Demeter) never mixed with the Greeks (Zeus).
474 André Mercier, “Discours de synthèse de l'entretien d’Athènes”, 1986, in
Chronos et Kairos, Vrin, Diotima, Institut international de philosophie, 1988, pp.
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The God El of the naturist Phoenician myths dating back to the second
millennium BCE is said to be the Master of Time, “Father of the
Years” as well as father of the other gods and of human beings. And
Philo of Byblos relates that El had supplanted Ouranos, to the point
where he identified him with Kronos (written with a kappa), and we
know today that there were parallels between the mythology of the
Ras Shamra texts and that governing the mysteries of Eleusis.
Meanwhile the Sidonians, who date to the first half of the first
millennium BCE, placed Time above all things, as noted by
Damascius in the 6th century CE, on the basis of Aristotle’s pupil
Eudemus.
Instead we should return to the sources preserved by the priests of the
cult of Eleusis to get a clear idea of the Achaean cult independent of
all these religious influences. Why? Because while the history of
peoples constantly changes, that of cults is not subject to the same
hazards of time; it is not subject to the time of heroes or of conquests.
Despite the recent discoveries of the Thebes tablets, we know very
little of the cult of Demeter Achaea.475 At the most we know that in
Eleusis Demeter Ma-ka (known by that name by Aeschylus476) is
placed before Zeus (o-po-rei, the protector of fruit) and that their
daughter is Kore (ko-wa). But Demeter still has the epithet “si-to”
(), indicating the link with the agrarian world, which also appears
in the use of all the flours that spring from the belly of the Earth, and
notably the barley flour used in religious services. The chosen animal
of this rite is the crane, which acts as a herald. In our view this
semantic field could refer back to the Earth-Mother. Such is,
moreover, the etymology of the name Demeter itself: Δημήτηρ
(Dêmếtêr) derives from Γῆ Μήτηρ (Gễ Mếtêr), “Mother Earth” or
Δημομήτηρ (Dêmomếtêr) “Mother of the Earth” and δῆμος / dễmos,
“the earth or the land”. Both the ritual of the cult and the etymology of
Demeter suggest to us that Ionian thought is rooted in the cult of
Demeter the Mother Earth. This enables us to provide a historical
counterweight to the influence of the Italian current of Iranian origin.
66-73, p. 67. Mercier is the author of a book on time that we have been unable to
consult: El tiempo, los tiempos, y la filosophia, Mexico, 1985.
475 Cf. Jean-Louis Perpillou, “Les nouvelles tablettes de Thèbes. (Autour d’une
publication)”, Revue de philologie, de littérature et d’histoire anciennes, LXXV,
2001/2, pp. 307-315. The reference works are the series launched by Eleni
Andrikou, Vassilis L. Aravantinos, Louis Godart, Anna Sacconi, Joanita Vroom,
Thèbes. Fouilles de La Cadmée. I and II, Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici
Internazionali, Pisa – Roma, 2006.
476 Aeschylus, The Suppliants, 80-892.
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For our part we still have to insert this historical vision into our
investigation. The agrarian dimension of the cult of Demeter and the
semantic register of the Mother Earth mark a lexical field associated
with fertility. The Mother Earth is always represented with an outsized
belly and is potentially boundlessly fertile. But this potential fertility
is not human. She does not give birth to a monster, but to the earth
itself, in other words to fertility. The fertility of the world is its ability
to keep engendering itself, like Cronos in the myth of races. The
notion of fertility is intimately linked to that of time. To impregnate is
to ensure the permanence of the world in time. It is eternity over time.
From this we can understand that the cult of Demeter Achaea was a
cult of fertility, and this fertility was intimately linked to the specific
time of the heavens. In many places around the Mediterranean the
Mother Earth has also been found with a distaff representing a
machine to measure the time of the heavens, as we saw in relation to
Penelope’s distaff.477 It is this fertility that gives rise to “physics” and
to the strictly Ionian philosophical exploration of “generation” and
“corruption”. Here again, this thesis is confirmed by Aeschylus, who
perfectly describes the immanent Ionian time that is the complete
opposite of Iranian transcendent time. Here is what he says in Seven
against Thebes:478
...and Mother Earth, your beloved nurse. For welcoming all the
distress of your childhood, when you were young and crept upon her
kind soil, she raised you to inhabit her and bear the shield.
And more theoretically in The Libation Bearers:479
477 Schuhl, La fabulation platonicienne, op. cit., p. 77; cf. also Charles Picard, Le fil
d’Ariane dans le merveilleux, la pensée et l’action, 1952, pp. 125-128.
478 Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, 17-20, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0014
Cf. L. Lupas and Z. Petre, Commentaire aux Sept contre Thèbes d'Eschyle, vv. 17-
20 n.
479 Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0008%
3Acard%3D106
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...and Earth herself, who gives birth to all things, and having nurtured
them receives their increase in turn.
Ionian time is immanent and constantly recalled to this immanence by
the cycle of generations. In our next book we shall investigate in more
depth, following the work of Gérard Naddaf, whether the Ionian world
view presented here is indeed that adopted in Aristotle’s Physics.
However hypothetical the Achaean world view identified here
may be, it still makes it easier to understand the distance between the
Italian vision of philosophy and that of strictly Ionian origin. The
Italian vision is subject to the Iranian God Zurvan Akarana, who is
infinite time (aiôn). Because infinite time is immeasurable to humans,
the only possible response to it is heroism. This heroism involves
stages of initiation leading back to the initial phase, as indicated by the
knowledge assimilated by Pythagoreanism. Hegel seeks to follow this
path, but is unable to reach its term because he has not been initiated.
Conversely, the Ionian vision of the world, as it appears in the cult of
Eleusis, deals with questions directly related to the Earth, fertility and
generation. The opposition here is not between good and evil but
between things that grow and things that do not. The question of evil
is not fundamental to the Ionian perspective, unlike the Iranian. This is
why we would suggest that Aristotle’s work is of Ionian inspiration. It
is this world view that seems to have been transposed into Ionia and it
is no coincidence that it was precisely Ionia that saw the emergence of
true philosophy rooted in the analysis of fertility, of things that live
and grow, of the physical. Indeed, throughout Aristotle’s work, he
constantly calls the Ionians the physicists physiologoï, (physiologues)
in contrast to the theologians = théologoï, (theologues).480 So we can
now grasp the full meaning and historical depth of this description and
contrast it with the Italian thinkers. The substantivised term “physics”
comes from the Greek feminine adjective physikè (φυσικη). It is
derived from the root phyô meaning “grow”, “develop”, and thus
signifies generation and growth – in other words the world’s fertility,
whose guardian in the Mediterranean had always been the Mother
Earth. A physical analysis of generation can be applied to anything
480 On this fundamental Aristotelian opposition, see the talk delivered at the
University of Nanterre in February 1998 by John A. Palmer, entitled, Aristotle on
the Ancient Theologians and published in the American journal Apeiron, pp. 181-
205. The opposition between these two currents is not purely rhetorical. While
Thales was the first thinker to express himself clearly, he was also the first to
explore the physical world in the fullest sense of the word.
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481 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan,
Regenery Publishing Inc., 1962, p. 42.
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482 Thales of Miletus, Fragment D-K A22. This fragment is taken from a quotation
from Aristotle’s De anima 411a 7-8. The whole reads: “Some say that soul is
diffused throughout the whole universe; and it may have been this which led Thales
to think that all things are full of gods”, trans. Arthur Fairbanks, The First
Philosophers of Greece (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1898). See also
Generation of Animals, III, 762a 21 which states the Pythagorean consequence that
everything is full of souls. Cf. also Plato, Laws, 899b: “will any one who admits all
this venture to deny that all things are full of Gods?” (trans. Jowett).
483 The term principle (arché) seems to have been introduced by Anaximander,
according to the preserved fragment fr.2 of Opinions of the Physicists by Aristotle’s
student Theophrastus: “Of those who say that the element is one, in motion and
infinite, Anaximander son of Praxiades of Miletus – the successor and disciple of
Thales – said that the infinite was both the principle and element of the things that
exist, and was the first to use this name for the principle.” Colli, La Sagesse grecque
II, pp. 175 and 247. Simplicius’ commentary is also based on the book by
Theophrastus (p. 304). See also Pierre Pellegrin’s introduction to Aristotle’s
Physics, p. 12 and of course Book Delta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics which, according
to Pellegrin, adopts the fundamental aspects of Ionian physics, notably the positivity
of coming to be. The arché is described as “That from which (as an immanent part)
a thing first arises”, 1013a 3-10, trans. Barnes, op. cit., p. 1599. French commentary
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Métaphysiques. Livre Delta, trans. M.-P. Duminil and A. Jaulin, PUM, 1991, pp.
131-135.
484 Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, 23, 29, fr. D-K 1-80.
485 Cf. also Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 3, 983b 21; b 6 ff.; On the Heavens, B, 13,
294a 28; Politics, I, 11, 1259a 10.
486 Unfortunately, the division between rational Ionians and irrational Pythagoreans
is not so simple. It would mean ignoring the eschatological dimension of Chaldean
culture, which is present in Ionian thought after the fall of Babylon.
487 According to Aristotle, Problems, XVI, 8 914b, it was Anaxagoras who
invented the clepsydra used in the Athenian courts, cf. also Empedocles, 21B 100.
488 Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, LXVII, 2 and 3.
489 In 264 BCE Timaeus of Tauromenium suggested using the Olympiads to
measure years. This was a late initiative to measure time. Before this the Athenian
year began in the summer, as did the Olympic, the Dorian year began in autumn and
the year in Argos at the spring equinox. So there was no unified calendar in Greece.
Moreover, the Pythia used this state of affairs to adjust her predictions at will, cf. the
comic episode of the Delphic oracle’s advice to Cylon (636).
490 Bouvier, art. cit., p. 121.
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491 According to Schuhl the gnomon came to Athens via Lydia: “The same route
must have brought the polos and gnomon, the spherical and flat sundials which,
according to Herodotus, the Greeks obtained from the Babylonians – along with the
division of the day into twelve hours – and which Anaximander introduced to
Sparta”. Essai sur la formation de la pensée grecque. Introduction historique à une
étude de la philosophie platonicienne, PUF, 1949, p. 179.
492 Arpád Szabo and Erkka Maula, Les débuts de l’astronomie, de la géographie et
de la trigonométrie chez les Grecs, French translation from the German by Michel
Federspiel, 1986, pp. 33-35.
493 This was the first criterion for attributing the title of “sage”.
494 Homer had the greatest scorn for these “Phoenician” traders. In The Odyssey
XV, 411 we read: “One day the island was visited by a party of Phoenicians –
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While the Greek captains plotted their course by the Great Bear, the
Ionians advised them to follow Ursa Minor as a more precise, if less
splendid means to find the North Pole.495 It was also trade that led the
Ionians to develop a relationship with numbers. In the world of
commerce number is important for exchange and became a key aspect
of this culture, as Eudemus of Rhodes explains: 496
Just as among the Phoenicians the necessities of trade and exchange
gave the impetus to the accurate study of number, so also among the
Egyptians the invention of geometry came about from the cause
mentioned.
It was again trade that obliged these experienced sailors to go beyond
the limits of the known Greek world. By inching their way along the
African coast, they made one of the greatest discoveries in all of
Antiquity.497 As they descended the Libyan coast,498 they realised that
famous sailors, but greedy rogues – with a whole cargo of trinkets in their black
ship”; see also XVII, 428-430. Plato (Republic, IV 436a) also criticised this
relationship to trade. Lastly, we know that it was the “Phoenicians” who brought the
Hebrews the nose piercings and bracelets that were melted down to make the golden
calf, not to mention the trade in cedar wood for the Egyptian cults.
495 The source is Callimachus and recorded by Diogenes Laertius, I, 1, op. cit.
trans. Hicks. Colli (p. 121) confirms it and gives the following references to the
corpus of Phoenician studies: Arat., Phaen. 37-39 and Guthrie, I, 5, in op. cit., II, p.
290. So the source is reliable. (The North Star, nurse of Zeus, was then called
Cynosoura).
496 Eudemus of Rhodes, History of Geometry, fragment 133, trans. Glenn R.
Morrow, cited by Colli, La Sagesse Grecque II, 10b5a, DK-11A11, p. 139.
497 The first voyage of the “Phoenicians” to distant lands took place in 617 BCE
and was organised by the Egyptians. The later voyage of Hanno took place in 425
BCE. A Greek version of the periplus entitled “Narrative of the voyage of Hanno,
King of the Carthaginians around the lands beyond the Pillars of Hercules” was
engraved on plates hung in the temple of Kronos in Athens.
498 The term Libya does not designate the area covered by the Libya of today.
Herodotus is using a generic term by which the Ionian geographer Hecataeus of
Miletus referred to Africa. For Herodotus, beyond the region of the dunes, which
linked the pillars of Herakles to Thebes, there are only three peoples: the Atlanteans,
the Alarantes and the Garamantes. Beyond these dunes the world was unknown,
which may explain why he was unable to accept the eyewitness accounts of the
“Phoenicians” concerning a country that must have been Gabon, if we follow the
current line of the equator to the African coast. Moreover, Pliny also says “Libya”
refers to Africa in his Natural History V, 1-8: “Africa was called Libya by the
Greeks, and the sea in front of it the Libyan Sea,” and the historians agree that the
end of the expedition was the gulf of Guinea, which is the precise location of Gabon.
Lastly, in his Meteorology Aristotle confirms that Libya was indeed Africa, I, 13,
350b 10.
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the sun had changed sides; this was the first historical discovery
relating to the equator. It is formally attested by the historian
Herodotus, who refused to accept it, so revolutionary did it seem:499
Significantly, he rejects the accounts of a polar night and rules out the
accounts of the Phoenicians who, on a voyage around Africa,
observed that the position of the sun became inverted after crossing
the equator: “They record a fact which I find unbelievable, though
others may believe it: sailing round Libya, they said they had the sun
on their right.” IV, 42.
It seemed the seasons might not be identical over the entire oecumène;
worse still, they were inverted, as the Scythians had previously told
the Greeks, at least in the time of Herodotus.500 So was the sun not at
its solstice in Athens at the same time as in the rest of the known
world? This is what the Greeks of this time, gazing into the navel of
their Orphic cults, could not accept.501 Worse, this discovery would
discredit the work of Homer, who still believed that the world ended
at the Pillars of Hercules. It was a considerable time before the
Athenians were able to assimilate all of Ionian knowledge – the denial
of Herodotus is incontestable proof of that. Moreover the geographer
Strabo says that it was not until the time of Anaximander that a map of
the world was finally shown to the public, perfectly illustrating that it
took several centuries for Ionian thought to become a part of Athenian
culture:502
Anaximander was the first to publish a geographical chart. Hecatæus
left a work [on the same subject], which we can identify as his by
means of his other writings.
499 Bouvier, “Temps chronique et temps météorologique chez les premiers Grecs”,
art. cit., p. 134.
500 Pliny in his Natural History says in 2, 186-187: “In consequence of the daylight
increasing in various degrees, in Meroë the longest day consists of twelve
æquinoctial hours and eight parts of an hour, at Alexandria of fourteen hours, in
Italy of fifteen, in Britain of seventeen. Anaximenes the Milesian, the disciple of
Anaximander, of whom I have spoken above, discovered the theory of shadows and
what is called the art of dialling, and he was the first who exhibited at Lacedæmon
the dial which they call sciothericon”, English trans. John Bostock, cited in Colli, La
Sagesse grecque II, p. 221.
501 The navel of the world was a stone found in Delphi. In the same period
Anaxagoras’ disciple Archelaos of Athens was still trying to describe the Earth as a
disk in order to explain why the time of sunrise changes, as do the stars when we
move. See Schuhl, Essai, p. 341.
502 Strabo, 1, 1,11, DK 12A6, trans. Hamilton and Falconer, cited by Colli, op. cit.,
II, p. 181.
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503 Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, “Nicias”, trans. John
Dryden.
504 Schuhl, La fabulation platonicienne, p. 16: “Windelband sees the myths as
reflecting an effort to associate the religion of mysteries with Ionian physics”, a
thesis contested by Perceval Frutiger [1930] but which we retain, while stating that it
is only one aspect of the use of myth.
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505 Eclipses of the moon often triggered battles, such as that against the Syracusians
that Plutarch relates in this passage, following Thucydides. Understanding lunar
phenomena was an art of war, which is why astral studies eventually became
necessary to Athens and Anaxagoras’ book became better known after the death of
Nicias.
506 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 7, 1141b 2-8, trans. Barnes. See also the
commentary by Colli, S.G. II, p. 283.
507 Aristotle, Politics, II, 8, 6, 1268a.
508 Plato, The Republic, trans. Jowett, 414 b8-C7.
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Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician tale of what has often
occurred before now in other places, (as the poets say, and have made
the world believe).
Socrates is telling us that new things always come from the
“Phoenicians” (Ionians), as is the case now and always will be as long
as Athenian society has not abandoned its religious categories.509 And
this is why the poets were dangerous, for it was they who preserved
the real history of the Athenian state. The Athenian politicians and
philosophers were not interested in technical skill and so were never
able to assess the real use of knowledge that came to them from
adjacent cultures. This may be why their purely theoretical research
was never corrected, for example in relation to the revolution of the
Earth. While Plato upheld the “Pythagorean” thesis that the Earth
made a single revolution, notably to explain the alternation of night
and day,510 unbelievably, in his On the Heavens Aristotle followed the
Ionian error:511
But there are some, Anaximander, for instance, among the ancients,
who say that the earth keeps its place because of its indifference.
Motion upward and downward and sideways were all, they thought,
equally inappropriate to that which is set at the centre.
Although this thesis, probably taken from Thales, is criticised later in
On the Heavens, it is ultimately accepted, with the consequences we
know. No star has movement per se, no star is self-propelled or it
would simply wander (planètos).512 Like the other stars, the Earth has
its place on a sphere on which it turns, in the model of Eudoxus.513 In
other words, the movement of the stars results entirely from the
spheres to which they are attached. However Aristotle follows Thales
509 As we have seen, when Plato wanted to talk about the future, he placed all these
conceptions in the mouth of Socrates. Aristotle twice cites the Phaedo in his
Metaphysics and, in a rare enough event to be worth mentioning, they are the same
two phrases: “In the Phaedo the case is stated in this way – that the Forms are
causes both of being and of becoming”, A, 9, 991b 3 and M, 5, 1080a 2.
510 Aristotle, On the Heavens, II, 13, 293a 20-23: “The Italian philosophers known
as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth
is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre.”
The model of the Earth turning on its own axis is set out in Plato’s Timaeus (893c)
and, in Schuhl’s view, experimentally tested by the potter’s wheel, La fabulation
platonicienne, p. 95.
511 Aristotle, On the Heavens, II, 13, 295b 11-14. At II, 8, 289b 5 Aristotle says:
“We take it as granted that the earth is at rest.”
512 Aristotle, On the Heavens, II, 8, 290a 32-35.
513 Cf. Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde, I, op. cit., p. 130.
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in refusing to accept that the Earth turns on itself. On the contrary, the
circular movement it makes takes it towards the centre.514 In this
model it is the sun’s sphere that explains the daily movement over the
Earth from east to west via the south every twenty-four hours.515 So
Aristotle is using the model of Eudoxus of Cnidual, in tandem with
remarks from Eudemus of Rhodes, whose task it was to gather the
Academy’s astronomical data. This error was not corrected by the
astronomer Callippus, nor even by Sosigenes. For that it was
necessary to wait until Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus sent his own
pupil Strato of Lampsacus to the court of Ptolemy I in Alexandria and
one of his successors, Aristarchus of Samos, objected to this enormous
error peddled by Aristotle’s philosophy, as related by a historian of the
Alexandrian school:516
Aristarchus of Samos, who perhaps possessed some traditions of the
School of Croton, did the science of the heavens a great service. The
old theory that the sun moved round the earth had been re-established
on Aristotle’s authority, and contrary to the opinion of Pythagoras.
Aristarchus did all he could to bring back the bolder, and truer theory
of the movement of the earth.
We do not know what role may have been played by the priests of the
cult of Demeter Achaea in maintaining the geocentric model. But as
the heliocentric model rejected by the Areopagus underpinned the
other Pythagorean thesis of Iranian origins, which placed the sun at
the centre of the universe, it is understandable that the books of the
time could not mention it.517 We have seen that it was one of the first
questions that the members of the Areopagus put to Socrates at his
trial, to which Socrates simply replied that all of these things were
already contained in books in the public square and, that being so, that
they were themselves responsible since they should have prevented
their distribution.518 It remains the case that the Athenians’ inability to
514 At 295b 20-21 Aristotle says, “The observed facts about earth are not only that
it remains at the centre, but also that it moves to the centre,” and lastly on this point,
II, 14, 296b 21-22: “The earth must be at the centre and immovable”.
515 Cf. Tricot’s commentary on Book , 8 of Aristotle’s Métaphysique II, note 2, p.
691 of the 1962 edition.
516 Jacques Matter, Histoire de l’école d’Alexandrie comparée aux principales
écoles contemporaines, vol. 2, 1844. On p. 178 he says, “Strato of Lapsacus spent
some years at the court of Ptolemy I, sent there by Theophrastus who had been
called there and had wanted to oblige the prince by giving him one of his pupils.”
517 Matter, Histoire de l’école d’Alexandrie…, p. 184.
518 So what does it mean to be an Aristotelian in relation to astronomy? If we
remain more Aristotelian than Aristotle himself, the geocentric model can be
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identify the right theory was due to their lack of interest in technical
skills. Meanwhile we can confirm that the “Phoenicians” living in
Ionia, the Milesians, contributed many practical techniques, concrete
facts and theories true and false that enabled the Ionian philosophers
to develop a conception of the world that was closer to reality.
We shall now consider geometry, the second dimension
necessary to make new discoveries in physics and astronomy, and the
one underpinning the Greeks’ first real conception of the world. It is
often said that Greek geometrical knowledge came from the
Egyptians. However, the greatest geometrical theorem is attributed to
Thales and bears his name, as Aristotle confirms in his Prior
Analytics.519 Analysis of the shadows of the pyramids may have
provided its explanation, but this theorem should probably be
attributed to the knowledge of the “Phoenicians” who had not yet
settled in Ionia. Moreover, this is confirmed by Plutarch who, in his
Banquet of the Seven Sages, emphasises the admiration of the
Egyptian king Amasis, who was literally dumfounded when Thales
conducted his demonstration to measure the pyramids.520 Plutarch
returns to the basis of the theoretical model a little later:521
Fixing your staff erect at the point of the shadow which the pyramid
cast, two triangles being thus made by the tangent rays of the sun, you
demonstrated that what proportion one shadow had to the other, such
the pyramid bore to the stick.
So Thales, who was then on a visit to Egypt with the Greek Solon, had
merely applied the theorem to the pyramids. Its source may well not
be the measurement of the pyramids, or architecture at all.522 We learn
retained as the one that he truly upheld. If we think that this error was corrected by a
pupil of Aristotle’s, being an Aristotelian involves accepting the future of this school
and thus accepting the heliocentric model.
519 Aristotle confirms that this theorem, found in 1, 5 of Euclid’s Elements, was
based on the work of Thales, cf. Prior Analytics, 41b 13-22.
520 Plutarch, Banquet of the Seven Sages, 2, 147a-b. Cf. the slightly different
versions of the pyramid-measuring story in Diogenes Laertius l. 27 and Pliny,
Natural History 36.82. Plutarch himself attributes the tyrant’s remark to Bias at De
Adulatore et amico 61c; c.f. the much longer version at De Genio Socratis 578d.
521 Plutarch, Banquet of the Seven Wise Men, 2, DK-11A21, trans. Roger A.M.
Davis, in Plutarch’s Morals. Translated from the Greek by Several Hands.
Corrected and Revised by William W. Goodwin, with an Introduction by Ralph
Waldo Emerson. 5 Volumes. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1878). Vol. 2. 14
April 2015. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1212#Plutarch_0062-02_1551
522 Solon travelled twice with Thales to consult the sages and astronomers of the
Egyptian court in the city of Sais, in Diogenes Laertius, op. cit., I, p. 59. In his
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527 Diogenes Laertius, Vie, doctrines et sentences des philosophes illustres, I & II,
trans. Robert Genaille, Garnier Flammarion, 1965, translator’s note p. 269. Colli
does not regard this attribution as definitive, in op. cit., II, p. 291, and most other
specialists have their reservations.
528 The account of this eclipse, mentioned only insofar as it marks the beginning of
a war, is once again from Eudemus of Rhodes. According to fr. 143: “Eudemus
observes in his History of Astronomy that Thales predicted the eclipse of the sun
which took place at the time when the Medes and the Lydians engaged in battle”, D-
K I, 74-75, trans. Sir Thomas Heath.
529 Szabo and Maula, Les débuts de l’astronomie, de la géographie et de la
trigonométrie chez les Grecs, French translation from the German by Federspiel,
1986, p. 36. The authors note that Anaximander may have been the inventor of the
analemma. This hypothesis is confirmed by Michel Serres (ed.) A History of
Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of Science, Blackwell, 1995, trans. Ros
Schwartz and Daffyd R. Roberts, p. 79.
530 Aristotle assimilated the notions of the equator and tropics and had clearly
mastered them as reflected in his Meteorology, I, 7, 345a 3-8.
531 Serres (ed.), A History of Scientific Thought, p. 79.
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543 We shall return to this concept of apeiron. However, we should be clear that in
this perspective the notions of the infinite and of time are consubstantial, as Aristotle
explains in his Physics.
544 Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics, 1121, 5 (and 12), ed. G.S. Kirk and J.E.
Raven; cf. also Commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo, 615, 13 “as it seems, he
posited infinite worlds and that each of the worlds is generated from such an
element, which is infinite”, cited in Anthony Preus (ed.) Essays in Ancient Greek
Philosophy VI: Before Plato, State University of New York Press, 2001, p. 52.
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years: and these seventy years give twenty-five thousand and two
hundred days, not reckoning for any intercalated month. Then if every
other one of these years shall be made longer by one month, that the
seasons may be caused to come round at the due time of the year, the
intercalated months will be in number five-and-thirty besides the
seventy years; and of these months the days will be one thousand and
fifty. Of all these days, being in number twenty-six thousand two
hundred and fifty, which go to the seventy years, one day produces
nothing at all which resembles what another brings with it. Thus then,
O Crœsus, man is altogether a creature of accident.
In this analysis Solon is looking for a human limit,549 the end of
human lives. Having found this limit, he has all of human life in his
hand, in the place of the parcae or the gods. He can then divide this
totality in two, each part bringing “nothing at all which resembles
what another brings with it”. One brings its share of benefits and
happiness (generation), the other horrors, torment and misery
(corruption). This division is made possible only in the light of human
time as a whole, which is why Solon says that life is a matter of
accident. In sum, overlaying generation and corruption there is an
objective time that smooths out human events in order to give each
individual equal shares of what they are owed. Temporal justice is
thus equality (A=A). In giving individuals their share of happiness and
misfortune, objective time delivers justice or, rather, equality. So
throughout their lives, human beings are subject to positive generation
and negative corruption in an egalitarian fashion. In relation to global
time, which constantly reasserts its function, all human beings are thus
equal. There is something in these conceptions of time developed by
Solon that is not reducible to the arbitrary nature of divine will
seeking to do justice in a religious universe. There is no divine justice,
but there does seem to be a principle of equality, the true nature of
which is given us by the fragment of Anaximander. While this
incontestably is a fragment of Anaximander, the conception of time
developed within it cannot be specific to him, since it was previously
expressed by Solon. We can assume that it was during his travels to
Egypt that Thales told him of this Ionian principle. However, we
should recognise that this is manifestly a new conception of time, in
which it seems that cycles (periods: périodos) have acquired a new
meaning. The cycle is no longer seen as a repetition of the same (the
549 The time limit also becomes the spatial limit of the Athenian city. At the end of
a famous poem, Solon says: “But I stood firm, like a boundary stone between two
armies”.
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553 Perhaps we can lift this principle out of “dreams” as Aristotle says, to find the
basis of a movement called dialectic in Hegel’s philosophy? But this movement
cannot be reduced to either the sensory conflicts (hot and cold) which Empedocles
wrongly transposed into the conceptual order, or to the conceptual opposites (A-inv.
A), other than in the principle of identity which supports the principle of logical non-
contradiction) which Hegel wrongly projects onto sensory conflicts. (If the dialectic
is circular, in other words encased in language, in a conceptual logic as Hegel said,
then dialectic is no longer possible). Let us cite Aristotle: “But the third principle
must be present as well – the cause vaguely dreamed of by all our predecessors,
definitely stated by none of them”, On Generation and Corruption, II, 9, 335b 8-9.
554 The discovery of the inclination of the ecliptic is attributed, unreliably, to
Oenopides, an Ionian of Chios and a successor to Thales. According to Schuhl, “A
slightly younger contemporary of Anaxagoras, Oenipodes of Chios, may have
discovered the inclination of the ecliptic. This would have solved the difficulties that
seem to have preoccupied Anaxagoras. Oenopides fixed the length of the solar year
as 365 and 1/3 days and that of the Great Year as 59 years. For Cleostratus, who
introduced the signs of the Zodiac around 520, it was eight years and nineteen years
for Meton, who expounded his theory in 432 with much success”, Essai…, p. 336.
555 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, II, 10, 336a 31-35- 336b 1-10.
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This explains why it is not the primary motion that causes coming-to-
be and passing-away, but the motion along the inclined circle; for this
motion not only possesses the necessary continuity, but includes a
duality of movements as well. For if coming-to-be and passing-away
are always to be continuous, there must be some body always being
moved (in order that these changes may not fail) and moved with a
duality of movements (in order that both changes, not one only, may
result). Now the continuity of this movement is caused by the motion
of the whole; but the approaching and retreating of the moving body
are caused by the inclination. For the consequence of the inclination is
that the body becomes alternately remote and near; and since its
distance is thus unequal, its movement will be irregular. Therefore, if
it generates by approaching and by its proximity, it – this very same
body – destroys by retreating and becoming remote: and if it generates
by many successive approaches, it also destroys by many successive
retirements. For contrary effects demand contraries as their causes;
and the natural processes of passing-away and coming-to-be occupy
equal periods of time.
While the theologians portray the future as an illusion the better to
maintain the sway of their traditions, astronomy counters
mythological conceptions that enclose time in a circle and refutes such
religious mythologies. Both really and apparently, the sun’s distance
from the Earth is not constant. And, through ontocentrism, we
understand that the same is true of human beings in relation to their
time and also of the other creatures on Earth. Generation can be
understood to occur when the Earth nears the sun and corruption when
the two move away from each other. But, more crucially, through an
anthropocentric analogy, this model brings the realisation we have
seen expressed by the sage Solon, that when it comes to human affairs
time can no longer be the indefinitely regular and circular repetition of
identical sameness. Time has phases, which explains its necessary
irregularity. These phases are periods (periodos) and are subject to the
two great phases of generation and corruption. These two phases are
themselves integrated into an overall cycle, as Aristotle indicates: “the
natural processes of passing-away and coming-to-be occupy equal
periods of time”. Here we return to the order of time in the quotation
from Anaximander, who says of the two phases “for they give justice
and make reparation to one another for their injustice, according to the
arrangement of Time.” To invert Jaeger’s proposition, this is not:556
556 Jaeger, Paideia, The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume 1, Archaic Greece: the
Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet, Oxford University Press, 1945, p. 160, cited
by Anna Kelessidou, “L’avenir chez les présocratiques de Thalès à Démocrite”, in
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
taken from the probability that the world will continue. If the
continuity of the world cannot be maintained, the future collapses. If
the continuity of the world is certain, the future becomes probable. If
the continuity of the world is probable, the future becomes merely
possible. Lastly, if the continuity of the world is only possible, the
future also becomes possible, but its probability becomes more or less
impossible. Is this a necessary and sufficient reason to accept that, in
adopting this model, Aristotle was forced to be a philosopher of
continuity? At this stage in our study we shall leave this question
open.
To return to Aristotle’s discussion, we must note the following:
generation occurs when the sun and Earth are closer, and corruption
when they move apart. We shall see in greater depth in the context of
physics that generation and corruption explain “change”. It remains
the case that, scientifically, this continuous, twin movement is
irregular and liable to stop. For, when phases of greater luminosity are
registered on the gnomon, the stars seem to stop and go backwards,
then stop again and continue their regular course, later described in
technical terms as “stations” and “retrogradations” of the stars. The
information obtained via the gnomon leads to reservations regarding
the model’s reliability. For if a star temporarily stops moving, what
guarantees that this stationary state will not be permanent? The same
question arises in relation to Aristotle’s physics, in which elements
can pause but never definitively stop until they reach their télos. And
when a star temporarily reverses direction, what ensures that its
probable course will never depart from its sphere? There is here a kind
of tautology which consists in suggesting that, because the course of
the stars is continuous, the world cannot stop, when the very definition
of the continuity of time is taken from these same stars. In this model
the guarantee of the world and the permanence of time are provided
by the motion of the heavens. The movement of the stars and sun
along the ecliptic are subject to a different movement, that of the
“motion of the whole”. It is this movement that explains why
increasing generation cannot be unlimited, since it is constrained by
corruption, and vice-versa. This general motion that gives movement
to the stars enables time always to be. So it is clear that ultimately
universal time retains the property of smoothing out and balancing the
two phases and thus of enabling the renewal of change through this
balance itself. For generation and corruption do not balance
automatically, the cancelling of negative and positive does not
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561 Schuhl, Essai…, pp. 299-300. However Schuhl accepts that this principle is a
projection of the social sphere onto the natural sphere, and so, as we have seen, does
Colli (p. 300).
562 Empedocles, fr. 26, cited by Schuhl, Essai…, p. 299.
563 See Colli, La Sagesse grecque II, p. 331, for the relationship between
Anaximenes and Empedocles on this subject.
564 Aristotle, Physics, 265b 28-32, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W.D. Ross, trans.
R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, Clarendon Press, 1930; cf. Colli’s commentary, SG II,
pp. 311-312.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
565 “Such people are apt to put that sort of thing into verse. Empedocles, for
instance, by his long circumlocutions imposes on his hearers; these are affected in
the same way as most people are when they listen to diviners, whose ambiguous
utterances are received with nods of acquiescence – ‘Croesus by crossing the Halys
will ruin a mighty realm’”; Aristotle, Rhetoric III, 1407a 33-40, trans. W. Rhys
Roberts.
566 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption II, 10, 336b 16-20: “And there are
facts of observation in manifest agreement with our theories”, trans. Barnes.
567 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, B, 2, 89a 25-29, trans. Barnes.
568 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, B, 2, 89b-90a, trans. Barnes.
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
however, set out a few more markers here. It is generally thought that
the concept of existence is not present in the Aristotelian corpus and
that the division between being and essence was made by St. Thomas
Aquinas in his De ente et essentia.571 For Aquinas ousia was the
equivalent of essence. Access to existence takes two forms: singulars
and the soul. As there is no generic access to singulars, it is
impossible to place existence in any category. This allows Aquinas to
dispense with reason the better to bury existence beneath the
intelligence underpinning his notion of the soul. He follows Averroës
in saying that species can ultimately be known through this
intelligence, so that all natural species are governed by intelligence.
We shall return to this philosophy in more detail later. For the
moment we shall simply note Etienne Gilson’s view of it:572
It is as though Thomism had inherited from Aristotelianism the notion
of substance understood as a solid ontological mass in which essence,
existence and unity are all one.
However, it is apparent that neither the aforementioned model of the
ecliptic nor Aristotle’s physical conception reflect this categorisation.
A return to the Posterior Analytics will enable us to grasp this fully.
Firstly, if the concept of existence did not exist in Aristotle’s work,
what status should we give to the “signs” he calls tekmêrion? These
are indeed special signs, underpinning the syllogisms which, by
induction, ground the notion of existence in the categories. It is true
that in Aristotle’s epistemology induction is possible only in physics,
while logic is dominated by deduction and, unlike physics, does not
make hypotheses. We shall nevertheless seek to lift existence out
from under the yoke of intelligence the better to place it in the empire
of the senses which, for Aristotle, are themselves governed by
phantasia. In order to defuse the criticisms this thesis will arouse, we
should like to make available to all Aristotle’s thinking in Sense and
Sensibilia:573
For if it is impossible that a person should, while perceiving himself
or anything else in a continuous time, be at any instant unaware of his
own existence, and if there is in the time-continuum a time so small as
to be absolutely imperceptible, then it is clear that a person would,
571 Thomas Aquinas, L’Etre et l’essence. (De ente et essentia) French trans. C.
Capelle, Vrin, 1982. We shall follow the commentary of Canon Daniel-Joseph
Lallement, Tequi, 2001.
572 Etienne Gilson, L’Être et l’essence, Vrin 2000 (1948), p. 93.
573 Aristotle, Sense and Sensibilia, VII, 448a 26-29, trans. Barnes.
201
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
574 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, II, 11, 338b 01-12, trans. Barnes.
575 Aristotle, Meteorology, 14, 351a 27-35, trans. Barnes.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
course. It is owing to them that the parts of the earth come to have a
different character, so that some parts remain moist for a certain time,
and then dry up and grow old, while other parts in their turn are filled
with life and moisture.
So, in applying Anaximander’s principle to human beings, we should
respect Aristotle’s conception of the heavens. In this model human
beings have no direct connection with the heavens; there are many
concepts that make it possible to move from human beings to the
heavens, set out in Meteorology and On the Heavens. They will be the
subject of the next part. Moreover, the hiatus between the time of the
heavens and human time underpins Aristotle’s conception of history.
As the time of the heavens is greater than human time, history cannot
give us an idea of the history of peoples, since most of them disappear
before leaving a memory of their presence in the world:576
But the whole vital process of the earth takes place so gradually and in
periods of time which are so immense compared with the length of our
life, that these changes are not observed, and before their course can
be recorded from beginning to end whole nations perish and are
destroyed.
This is also the reason given to explain Aristotle’s great love of
proverbs; as we shall see, this hiatus also has major consequences for
his ethical vision. Before focusing more specifically on all these
notions in his philosophy of man, we shall simply say that this Ionian
principle is compatible with a conception of time on the human scale.
It moreover became the notion of akmè, which the Greek historians
used in writing the history of the figures of archaic Greece. This
notion takes its energy from the traditional concept of thûmos,577
which can be translated as the human capacity of “velocity”. Human
velocity is fundamentally finite, shooting up towards the akmè, the
better to fall back down and end in certain death, as Conche clearly
describes:578
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
The aiôn can be compared to a jet that first rises vigorously, then
levels out and finally declines and falls back down. The ages of life
are youth, maturity and old age, according to whether the life force
dominates matter, the two are in balance or matter gradually
overpowers vitality.
So human life is contained in an interval between birth and death,
whose middle point is the akmè. There is a phase of generation rising
to the age of forty, a solstice around that age, then the beginning of a
corruption leading inevitably to death. This is what we wanted to say
concerning this first analogy of the time of the heavens with that of
human lives. In the next part we shall take a more analytical approach
in discussing the a priori conditions of these analogies to gain a better
understanding of this apparent theoretical impasse.
PERORATION
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
ARISTOTLE
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208
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
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210
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
&&&
PLATO
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Bibliography of commentators
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211
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212
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
- Mc Ginnis, Jon, Time and time again: a study of Aristotle and Ibn
Sina’s temporal theories, Doctoral thesis, University of Pensylvania,
2000, 412 p.
- Mansion, A., “La théorie aristotélicienne du temps chez les
Péripatéticiens médiévaux. Averroès, Albert le Grand, Thomas
d’Aquin”, Rev. Néo-scol. Philos., XXXVI, 1934, pp. 275-307
- Martineau, E., “Conception vulgaire et conception aristotélicienne
du temps”, Archives de Philos. 43, 1980, pp. 99-120
- Miller, F.-D., “Aristotle on the Reality of time”, Archiv für
geschichte der philosophie, 56, 1974, pp. 132-155
- Moraux, Paul, A la recherche de l’Aristote perdu. Le dialogue “Sur
la justice”, Louvain-Paris, Publications universitaires de Louvain-
Nauwelaerts, 1957.
- Moreau, Joseph, Aristote et son école, PUF, 1985
- L’espace et le temps selon Aristote, Anténore, Padua, 1965
- “Le temps selon Aristote”, Revue philosophique de Louvain, 46,
1948, pp. 257-261
- Palmer, John A. “Aristotle on the Ancient Théologians”, Apeiron, pp. 181-
205
- Petit, Alain, “Individu et répétition: Aristote critique de l’éternel retour
pythagoricien”, kairos, 1997, pp. 169-178
- Philippe, Marie-Dominique, Autour d’Aristote, bulletin no. 10, ULSH,
January 1992, 52 p. (reprinted article from the Cercle thomiste de Caen,
Revue thomiste…)
- Cours de philosophie critique de l’université de Fribourg, 1953,
117 p.
- Introduction à la philosophie d’Aristote, éd. Universitaire, 1991 (Ed.
du Vieux Colombier, 1956)
- Reinach, Salomon, “Une allusion à Zagreus dans un problème
d’Aristote”, Revue archéologique, I, p. 162ff, Paris, 1919
- Rivaud, Albert, Le problème du devenir et la notion de la matière
dans la philosophie grecque des origines jusqu’à Théophraste, III, 2
(Aristote), Félix Alcan, 1906, pp. 369-450
- Rodrigo, P. and A. Tordesillas, “Politique, ontologie, rhétorique:
éléments d’une kairologie aristotélicienne”, in Pierre Aubenque (ed.),
Aristote. Politique. Etudes sur la métaphysique d’Aristote, PUF, 1993,
pp. 399-419
- Ross, W. D., Aristotle, Oxford, 1923.
- Vuillemin Jules, Eléments de Poétique, Vrin, 1991
213
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
&&&
General Bibliography
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215
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
216
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
217
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
218
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
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- Eliade Mircéa, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or Cosmos and History,
trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 1954
- Euripides, Heracles, trans. E.P. Coleridge,
http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/heracles.pl.txt
-The Phoenissae, trans. E.P. Coleridge:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01
.0118
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II, §§ 257-259, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 2004
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2004
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Robinson, Blackwell, 1962
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227
INDEX
134, 135, 137, 138, 153,
A 174, 180, 192, 199, 201,
203, 204
Aeschylus · 54, 60, 61, 113, Boethius · 22, 132
122, 123, 170, 171, 216 Boulnois Olivier · 59
aîon · 68, 129, 143, 144, 172, bound · 18, 48, 51, 56, 59, 69,
204 73, 74, 93, 97, 100, 109,
Anaxagoras · 28, 81, 92, 96, 110, 120, 140
107, 108, 142, 143, 144, Bouton Christophe· 88, 89, 92,
145, 154, 155, 158, 175, 214
178, 179, 180, 191, 193 Brague Rémy · 24, 25, 34, 59,
Anaximander · 18, 151, 173, 68, 75, 82, 91, 95, 96, 129,
174, 176, 178, 181, 185, 133, 204
186, 187, 188, 189, 190, Brisson Luc · 32, 54, 83, 95,
191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 154, 156, 211, 212, 214
199, 200, 202, 204 Brun Jean 99, 195, 212, 215
Anaximenes · 173, 178, 191, Bruno Giordano· 142, 188
198 Brunschwig Jacques · 32,
antichthôn · 146, 147, 148 65,212
apeiron · 139, 140, 188
Apollonius of Rhodes · 64 C
Aquinas St. · 59, 67, 89, 128,
201, 202 Celsus · 67, 156
Archelaos · 155, 158, 178 Cherniss · 186, 187
Archytas · 131, 135, 144, 212 chronos · 54, 72, 97, 125, 128,
Aristarchus of Samos · 182 144, 154
arithmos · 132, 133 Chronos · 34, 36, 59, 60, 68,
Aubenque Pierre · 33, 99, 121, 84, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98, 99,
211, 213 100, 115, 156, 169, 174, 215
Augustine St· 31, 52, 103, 109 Cicero · 22, 28, 31, 38, 59, 60,
80, 109, 156, 215
B circular time · 16, 40, 47, 49,
51, 58, 62, 69, 70, 72, 77,
Ballabriga Alain · 80, 184, 214 79, 85, 86, 93, 100, 102,
Barnes Jonathan· 43, 45, 56, 105, 115, 206
62, 65, 67, 73, 91, 108, 111, Clement of Alexandria · 123
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
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HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
Follon Jacques · 27, 28, 43, 102, 105, 110, 111, 112,
210 113, 114, 115, 116, 119,
Frère Jean · 60, 66, 81, 216 123, 127, 145, 148, 152,
Frontisi-Ducroux Françoise · 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 173
31, 216 Hippodamus · 180
Homer · 18, 25, 28, 33, 36, 37,
G 49, 53, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65,
66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74,
Galparine Marie-Claire· 23 75, 79, 80, 81, 86, 97, 101,
geometrical number · 137 102, 110, 111, 119, 123,
Georgius Gemistus · 24 154, 158, 161, 163, 165,
Gérase · 132 167, 168, 176, 178, 184
Gilson Etienne · 24, 201 Huffman Carl A · 131, 134,
Goldschmidt Victor· 56, 57, 217
157, 186, 189, 192, 212 Hutchinson D.S · 17, 21,27,
28, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42,
43, 44, 46, 96, 210
H
231
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
43, 44, 57, 84, 152, 153, moira · 60, 66, 81, 82, 128
157, 194, 195, 196, 212, 217 Montaigne · 56
Johnson M R· 17, 21, 27, 28, Motte André · 125
34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, Moutsopoulos Evanghélos· 68,
46, 96, 210 71, 72, 92, 114, 115
Musaeus · 111, 161, 162, 163
K
N
kairos · 41, 56, 68, 72, 84, 97,
100, 114, 136, 137 Naddaf Gérard· 172
Kant · 51, 52, 83, 96, 212, 217 Nicomachus of Gerasa · 132
Kelessidou Anna · 194 Nietzsche · 16, 51, 69, 70, 85,
Kierkegaard · 51 87, 125, 158, 167, 173, 195
kosmos · 59, 81, 83, 87, 108, nostos · 64
144 noûs · 28, 108, 143, 144, 145
Kronos · 59, 75, 79, 89, 93, 94, nuptial number · 131
97, 133, 156, 169, 170, 177
O
L
O’Brien Denis· 130
L’homme-Wéry Louise-Marie Ockham · 59
· 166 Oenopides · 193
Lardic Jean-Marie· 88 Origen · 156
Leibniz · 27, 96 Orphic · 26, 35, 36, 48, 54, 64,
Lombard Pierre· 59 79, 80, 93, 97, 103, 105,
Luther · 51, 59, 124, 132, 214 106, 108, 110, 126, 158,
Lynceus · 159 162, 178, 195
Ouranos · 53, 83, 91, 98, 99,
M 100, 109, 128, 129, 130,
169, 170
Maguseans · 88, 154
Mattei Jean-François · 30, 83, P
86, 90, 119, 127, 131, 144,
145, 149, 186, 214 palingenesis · 86, 104
Mazon Paul · 65, 84, 98, 100, Paradiso Annalisa· 85
112, 216, 217, 223 Parmenides · 30, 108, 127,
Mercier André · 68, 169 128, 129, 191
Messiah · 86, 88, 107 parousia · 52, 88, 121
metempsycosis · 103, 104
232
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
Pausanias · 111, 161, 163, 164, 158, 159, 166, 169, 174,
166 177, 179, 180, 181, 188,
Pellegrin Pierre · 44, 122, 209, 204, 211, 224
210 Pliny · 152, 177, 178, 183
Pelletier Yvan · 27, 44, 210 Plotinus · 27, 35, 36, 58, 68,
Pepe Lucio · 142 103, 108, 129, 133
péras · 73, 74, 139, 144 Plutarch · 80, 83, 84, 103, 156,
perichoresis · 143, 144 168, 169, 179, 180, 183
Périllié Jean-Luc· 130, 131, Porphyry · 36, 80, 169
134, 136, 151 Proclus · 23, 27, 28, 68, 92, 93,
Petit Alain· 132, 213 103, 104, 105, 123, 124, 149
Pherecydes of Syros · 104, Pythagoras · 28, 37, 79, 96,
151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 104, 105, 108, 109, 148,
158, 167, 174 150, 151, 153, 154, 155,
Philippe Marie-Dominique · 29 157, 158, 159, 160, 173, 182
Philo of Byblos · 169, 170 Pythagoreanism · 17, 18, 36,
Philolaus · 142 53, 87, 92, 103, 110, 116,
Philolus of Croton · 134 119, 122, 135, 141, 156,
Phoenician · 17, 159, 160, 161, 164, 169, 172
162, 163, 165, 166, 167,
168, 169, 170, 175, 176, Q
177, 181, 183, 184, 191, 206
Pickstock Catherine· 89 quiddity · 200, 202
Pindar · 34, 55, 72, 75, 94, 98,
104, 106, 107, 121, 126,
149, 154, 159, 163 R
Plato · 15, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26,
reincarnation · 41, 104, 105,
27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33,
106, 107, 110, 115
34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44,
Rose · 134, 137, 152, 210
45, 47, 48, 51, 59, 60, 63,
Ross · 27, 38, 122, 154, 162,
64, 67, 70, 74, 75, 81, 84,
198, 210, 213
85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96,
97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104,
105, 107, 108, 111, 114, S
116, 119, 120, 122, 125,
126, 127, 129, 130, 131, Sakellariou Michel B· 167
132, 133, 134, 135, 137, Sanchuniathon · 169
138, 139, 140, 141, 142, Schuhl Pierre-Maxime 15, 35,
144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 47, 51, 55, 69, 84, 103, 106,
149, 151, 152, 154, 155,
233
AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS OF TIME
234
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO PRE-ARISTOTELIAN TIME
235